
Class TS^S^-^ 
Book £ 3:1V 6 



Copyright N°_ 



,*^o8 



COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Voice oi the Machines 

An Introduction to the Twentieth Century 



BY 

Gerald Stanley Lee 



nortbatnptcn, /Dassacbueetts 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

DEC 21 '906 

Copyrlgrtif Entry 

OUSS O^ XXc, No. 

COPY B. 






Copyright, 1906 

BY 

THE MOUNT TOM PRESS 



.'"IK 



L 



TO JENNETTE LEE 

" Now and then my fancy caught 

A flying glimpse of a good life beyond — 
Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing, 
Troy falling, and the ages coming back, 
And ages coming forward," . , . . . 



^' 



Contents 



PART I 
THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES 

I. — Machines as Seen from a Meadow 
II. — As Seen through a Hatchway 
III. — The Souls of Machines 

IV.— Poets 

V. — Gentlemen .... 
VI.— Prophets .... 

PART II 
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES 

I. — As Good as Ours 
II. — On Being Busy and Still . 
III.— On Not Showing Off . . . 

IV. — On Making People Proud of the World 
V. — A Modest Universe 

iii 



PAGE 
3 

6 

12 

17 

20 

34 



41 

48 

52 
60 

65 



IV 



Contents 



PART III 
THE MACHINES AS POETS 

I. — Plato and the General Electric Works 
II. — Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth 

III. — The Grudge against the Infinite 

IV. — Symbolism in Modern Art 
V. — The Machines as Artists 

VI. — The Machines as Philosophers . 



PAGB 

73 
76 
84 
87 
94 
99 



PART IV 
THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES 

I. — The Idea of Incarnation . . .105 

II. — The Idea of Size . . , . .115 

III. — The Idea of Liberty . . . .120 

IV. — The Idea of Immortality . . -134 

v.— The Idea of God i44 

VI. — The Idea of the Unseen and the Iijtangible 151 

VII.— The Idea of Great Men . . .163 

VIII. — The Idea of Love and Comradeship . 170 



PART ONE 
THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES 



THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES 



MACHINES. AS SEEN FROM A MEADOW 

IT would be difficult to find anything in 
the encyclopedia that would justify the 
claim that we are about to make, or anything 
in the dictionary. Even a poem — which is 
supposed to prove anything with a little of 
nothing — could hardly be found to prove it; 
but in this beginning hour of the twentieth 
century there are not a few of us — for the time 
at least allowed to exist upon the earth — who 
are obliged to say (with Luther), "Though 
every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, we can- 
not say otherwise — the locomotive is beautiful." 

As seen when one is looking at it as it is, and 
is not merely using it. 

As seen from a meadow. 

We had never thought to fall so low as this, 
or that the time would come when we would 
feel moved — all but compelled, in fact — to betray 
to a cold and discriminating world our poor, 
pitiful, one-adjective state. 
3 



4 The Men Behind the Machines 

We do not know why a locomotive is beauti- 
ful. We are perfectly aware that it ought not 
to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for 
being beautiful — and of ourselves. We have 
attempted all possible words upon it — the most 
complimentary and worthy ones we know — ■ 
words with the finer resonance in them, and the 
air of discrimination the soul loves. We cannot 
but say that several of these words from time 
to time have seemed almost satisfactory to our 
ears. They seem satisfactory also for general 
use in talking with people, and for introducing 
locomotives in conversation; but the next time 
we see a locomotive coming down the track, 
there is no help for us. We quail before the 
headlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as 
the voice of the hurrying people. Our little 
row of adjectives is vanished. All adjectives 
are vanished. They are as one. 

Unless the word "beautiful" is big enough to 
make room for a glorious, imperious, world- 
possessing, world-commanding beauty like this, 
we are no longer its disciples. It is become a 
play word. It lags behind truth. Let it be 
shut in with its rim of hills — the word beauti- 
ful — its show of sunsets and its bouquets and 
its doilies and its songs of birds. We are seekers 
for a new word. It is the first hour of the 
twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so 
is the locomotive that conquers a hill. So is the 



Machines, As Seen from a Meadow 5 

telephone, piercing a thousand sunsets north 
to south, with the sound of a voice. The night 
is not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over 
the city, than the electric spark pushing the 
night one side, that the city may behold itself; 
and the hour is at hand — is even now upon us — 
when not the sun itself shall be more beautiful 
to men than the telegraph stopping the sun in 
the "midst of its high heaven, and holding it 
there, while the will of a child to another child 
ticks round the earth. "Time shall be folded 
up as a scroll," saith the voice of Man, my 
Brother. "The spaces between the hills, to 
ME," saith the Voice, "shall be as though they 
were not." 

The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice. 

It is the voice of the machines. 



II 

AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY ' 

IN its present importance as a factor in life 
and a modifier of its conditions, the machine 
is in every sense a new and unprecedented fact 
The machine has no traditions. The only way 
to take a traditional stand with regard to life 
or the representation of life to-day, is to leave 
the machine out. It has always been left out. 
Leaving it out has made little difference. Only 
a small portion of the people of the world have 
had to be left out with it. 

Not to see poetry in the machinery of this 
present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the 
age. It is not to believe in the age. 

The first fact a man encounters in this modern 
world, after his mother's face, is the machine. 
The moment be begins to think outwards, he 
thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in 
was sawed and planed by a machine, or cast in a 
foundry. The windows he looks out of were 
built in mills. His knife and fork were made 
6 



As Seen Through a Hatchway 7 

by steam. His food has come through rollers 
and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to 
him by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a 
factory and the cloth of the clothes he wears 
was flashed together by looms. 

The machine does not end here. When he 
grows to years of discretion and looks about him 
to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that 
that place must come to him out of a machine. 
By the side of a machine of one sort or another, 
whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of 
human beings' souls, he must find his place in 
the great whirling system of the order of mortal 
lives, and somewhere in the system — that is, 
the Machine — be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, 
or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him 
to be from the beginning of the world. 

The moment he begins to think, a human 
being finds himself facing a huge, silent, blue- 
and-gold something called the universe, the 
main fact of which must be to him that it seems 
to go without him very well, and that he must 
drop into the place that comes, whatever it may 
be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever 
be left behind. He learns before many years 
that this great machine shop of a globe, turning 
solemnly its days and nights, where he has 
wandered for a life, will hardly be inclined to 
stop — to wait perchance — to ask him what he 
wants to be, or how this life of his shall get 



8 The Men Behind the Machines 

itself said. He looks into the Face of Cir- 
cumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of 
Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a 
silent face. It points to the machine. He 
looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying 
past him night and day, — miles of streets of 
them. They, too, have looked into the Face of 
Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. 
They show it in their faces. Some of them 
show it in their gait. The Machine closes 
around him, with its vast insistent murmur, 
million-peopled and full of laughs and cries. 
He listens to it as to the roar of all Being. 

He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All 
men," says Pohtical Economy, "may be roughly 
divided as attaching themselves to one or the 
other of three great classes of activity — pro- 
duction, consumption or distribution." 

The number of persons who are engaged in 
production outside of association with ma- 
chinery, if they could be gathered together in 
one place, would be an exceedingly small and 
strange and uncanny band of human beings. 
They would be visited by all the world as 
curiosities. 

The number of persons who are engaged in 
distribution outside of association with ma- 
chinery is equally insignificant. Except for a 
few peddlers, distribution is hardly anything 
else but machinery. 



As Seen Through a Hatchway 9 

The number of persons who are engaged in 
consumption outside of association with ma- 
chinery is equally insignificant. So far as con- 
sumption is concerned, any passing freight train^ 
if it could be stopped and examined on its way 
to New York, would be found to be loaded with 
commodities, the most important part of which, 
from the coal up, have been produced by one 
set of machines to be consumed by another set 
of machines. 

So omnipresent and masterful and intimate 
with all existence have cogs and wheels and 
belts become, that not a civilized man could be 
found on the globe to-day, who, if all the 
machines that have helped him to live this 
single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled 
around him where he stands, would be able, for 
the machines piled high around his life, to see 
the sky — to be sure there was a sky. It is then 
his privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel 
and iron and running belts, to read in a paper 
book the literary definition of what this heaven 
is, that spreads itself above him, and above 
the world, walled in forever with its irrevocable 
roar of wheels. 

"No inspiring emotions," says the literary 
definition, "ideas or conceptions can possibly 
be connected with machinery — -or ever will be." 

What is to become of a world roofed in with 
machines for the rest of its natural life, and of 



lo The Men Behind the Machines 

the people who will have to live under the roof 
of machines, the literary definition does not 
say. It is not the way of literary definitions. 
For a time at least we feel assured that we, who 
are the makers of definitions, are poetically and 
personally safe. Can we not live behind the 
ramparts of our books? We take comfort with 
the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing 
around us. We sit by our library fires, the last 
nook of poetry. Beside our gates the great 
crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath 
our windows herds of human beings, flocking 
through the din, in the dark of the morning and 
the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. 
We have done what we could. Have we not 
defined poetry? Is it nothing to have laid the 
boundary line of beauty ? .... The huge, 
hurrying, helpless world in its belts and spindles 
— the people who are going to be obliged to live 
in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little 
more — all this — the great strenuous problem — ■ 
the defense of beauty, the saving of its past, the 
forging of its future, the welding of it with life — • 
all these? .... Pull down the blinds, 
Jeems. Shut out the noises of the street. A 
little longer .... the low singing to our- 
selves. Then darkness. The wheels and the 
din above our graves shall be as the passing of 
silence. 

Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man 



As Seen Through a Hatchway 1 1 

wants the society of his kind, he will have to 
look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he 
wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it 
and look away? I do not know. I only know 
how it is now. 

They stay not in their hold 

These stokers, 

Stooping to hell 

To feed a ship. 

Below the ocean floors, 

Before their awful doors 

Bathed in flame, 

I hear their human lives 

Drip — drip. 

Through the lolling aisles of comrades 

In and out of sleep, 

Troops of faces 

To and fro of happy feet, 

They haunt my eyes. 

Their murky faces beckon me 

From the spaces of the coolness of the sea 

Their fitful bodies away against the skies. 



Ill 

SOULS OF MACHINES 

IT does not make very much difference to the 
machines whether there is poetry in them or 
not. It is a mere abstract question to the ma- 
chines. 

It is not an abstract question to the people who 
are under the machines. Men who are under 
things want to know what the things are for, 
and they want to know what they are under 
them for. It is a very hve, concrete, practical 
question whether there is, or can be, poetry in 
machinery or not. The fate of society turns 
upon it. 

There seems to be nothing that men can care 
for, whether in this world or the next, or that 
they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is 
not bound up, in our modem age, with ma- 
chinery. With the fate of machinery it stands 
or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the 
characteristic vital power and spirit of the mod- 
ern age is organization, and it cannot organize 

12 



Souls of Machines 13 

in its religion, there is little to be hoped for in 
religion. Modern education is a machine. If 
the principle of machinery is a wrong and in- 
herently uninspired principle — if because a 
machine is a machine no great meaning can be 
expressed by it, and no great result accom- 
plished by it — there is little to be hoped for in 
modern education. 

Modern government is a machine. The more 
modern a government is, the more the machine 
in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. 
It is made up of (i) corporations — huge machines 
employing machines, and (2) of trusts — huge 
machines that control machines that employ 
machines. Modem charity is a machine for 
getting people to help each other. Modem 
society is a machine for getting them to enjoy 
each other. Modern literature is a machine for 
supplying ideas. Modem journalism is a ma- 
chine for distributing them; and modern art is 
a machine for supplying the few, very few, 
things that are left that other machines cannot 
supply. 

Both in its best and worst features the char- 
acteristic, inevitable thing that looms up in 
modem life over us and around us, for better or 
worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry 
at it, or not. It makes Httle difference to the 
machine. We may not see what it is for. It 
has come to stay. It is going to stay until we 
do see what it is for. We cannot move it. We 



14 The Men Behind the Machines 

cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. 
We are born in the machine. A man cannot 
move the place he is born in. We breathe the 
machine. A man cannot go around what he 
breathes, any more than he can go around him- 
self. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even 
by destroying himself. If there cannot be 
poetry in machinery — that is if there is no 
beautiful and glorious interpretation of ma- 
chinery for our modern life — there cannot be 
poetry in anything in modem life. Either the 
machine is the door of the future, or it stands 
and mocks at us where the door ought to be. 
If we who have made machines cannot make our 
machines mean something, we ourselves are 
meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine 
above our lives is meaningless, the winds that 
blow down upon us from it are empty winds, 
and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of 
darkness. There is one question that confronts 
and undergirds our whole modern civilization. 
All other questions are a part of it. Can a 
Machine Age have a soul? 

If we can find a great hope and a great mean- 
ing for the machine-idea in its simplest form, 
for machinery itself — that is, the machines of 
steel and flame that minister to us — it will be 
possible to find a great hope for our other 
machines. If we cannot use the machines we 
have already mastered to hope with, the less 



Souls of Machines 15 

we hope from our other machines — our spirit- 
machines, the machines we have not mastered — 
the better. In taking the stand that there is 
poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas and 
emotions can be and will be connected with 
machinery, we are taking a stand for the con- 
tinued existence of modem reHgion — (in all 
reverence) the God-machine; for modem edu- 
cation — the man -machine ; for modem govern- 
ment — the crowd-machine; for modem art — 
the machine in which the crowd lives. 

If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a 
machine simply because it is a machine, there 
is not going to be anything left in this modern 
world to connect inspiring ideas with. 

Johnstown haunts me — the very memory of 
it. Flame and vapor and shadow — like some 
huge, dim face of Labor, it Hfts itself dumbly 
and looks at me. I suppose, to some it is 
but a wraith of rusty vapor, a mist of old 
iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a 
train sweeps past. But to me, with its spires 
of smoke and its towers of fire, it is as if a great 
door had been opened and I had watched a 
god, down in the wonder of real things — in the 
act of making an earth. I am filled with child- 
hood — and a kind of strange, happy terror. I 
struggle to wonder my way out. Thousands of 
railways— after this— bind Johnstown to me; 
miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets— the 



i6 The Men Behind the Machines 

whole world lifting itself mightily up, rolling 
itself along, turning itself over on a great steel 
pivot, down in Pennsylvania — for its days and 
nights. I am whirled away from it as from a 
vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting 
their souls up in a great flame and laying down 
floors on a star. I have stood and watched, in 
the melting-down place, the making and the 
welding place of the bones of the world. 

It is the object of this present writing to 
search out a world — a world a man can live in. 
If he cannot live in this one, let him know it 
and make one. If he can, let him face it. If 
the word YES cannot be written across the 
world once more — written across this year of 
the world in the roar of its vast machines — 
we want to know it. We cannot quite see the 
word YES — sometimes, huddled behind our 
machines. But we hear it sometimes. We 
know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the 
machines themselves. 



IV 

POETS 

WHEN, standing in the midst of the huge 
machine-shop of our modem Hfe, we are 
informed by the Professor of Poetics that ma- 
chinery — the thing we do our Hving with — is 
inevitably connected with ideas practical and 
utilitarian — at best intellectual — that "it will 
always be practically impossible to make poetry 
out of it, to make it appeal to the imagination," 
we refer the question to the real world, to the 
real spirit we know exists in the real world. 

Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth 
century. 

Expectancy, which was the property of poets 
in the centuries that are now gone by, is the 
property to-day of all who are born upon the 
earth. 

The man who is not able to draw a distinction 

between the works of John Milton and the plays 

of Shakespeare, but who expects something of 

the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true 

2 17 



1 8 The Men Behind the Machines 

poet than any writer of verses can ever expect 
to be who does not expect anything of this 
same age he Hves in — not even verses. Ex- 
pectancy is the practice of poetry. It is poetry 
caught in the act. Though the whole world be 
lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath 
that poetry is dead, this same world is living in 
the presence of more poetry, and more kinds 
of poetry, than men have known on the earth 
before, even in the daring of their dreams. 

Pessimism has always been either literary — 
the result of not being in the real world enough — • 
or genuine and provincial — the result of not 
being in enough of the real world. 

If we look about in this present day for a 
suitable and worthy expectancy to make an age 
out of, or even a poem out of, where shall we 
look for it? In the literary definition? the 
historical argument? the minor poet? 

The poet of the new movement shall not be 
discovered talking with the doctors, or defining 
art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first 
by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see 
him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at 
night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and 
humbled with labor, but with the fire from 
the heart of the earth playing upon his face. 
His hands — innocent of the ink of poets, of the 
mere outsides of things — shall be beautiful with 
the grasp of the thing called life — with the 



Poets 19 

grim, silent, patient creating of life. He shall 
be seen living with retorts around him, loomed 
over by machines — shadowed by weariness — to 
the men about him half comrade, half monk — - 
going in and out among them silently, with some 
secret glory in his heart. 

If literary men — so called — knew the men 
who live with machines, who are putting their 
lives into them — inventors, engineers and brake- 
men — as well as they know Shakespeare and 
Milton and the Club, there would be no diffi- 
culty about finding a great meaning — i. e. , a 
great hope or great poetry — in machinery. The 
real problem that stands in the way of poetry in 
machinery is not literary, nor aesthetic. It is 
sociological. It is in getting people to notice 
that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet. 



V 

GENTLEMEN 

THE truest definition of a gentleman is that 
he is a man who loves his work. This 
is also the truest definition of a poet. The man 
who loves his work is a poet because he ex- 
presses delight in that work. He is a gentle- 
man because his delight in that work makes him 
his own employer. No matter how many men 
are over him, or how many men pay him, or 
fail to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven 
the one man who is master of the earth. He is 
the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man 
who loves his work has the single thing the world 
affords that can make a man free, that can make 
him his own employer, that admits him to the 
ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich 
enough to pay him, what a gentleman's work 
is worth. 

The poets of the world are the men who pour 
their passions into it, the men who make the 
world over with their passions. Everything 



Gentlemen 21 

that these men touch, as with some strange 
and immortal joy from out of them, has the 
thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. 
They cannot have it otherwise even if they 
would. A true man is the autobiography of 
some great delight mastering his heart for 
him, possessing his brain, making his hands 
beautiful. 

Looking at the matter in this way, in propor- 
tion to the number employed there are more 
gentlemen running locomotives to-day than 
there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as 
we are more creative in creating machines at 
present than we are in creating anything else 
there are more poets in the mechanical arts 
than there are in the fine arts; and while 
many of the men who are engaged in the 
machine-shops can hardly be said to be gentle- 
men (that is, they would rather be preachers or 
lawyers), these can be more than offset by the 
much larger proportion of men in the fine arts, 
who, if they were gentlemen in the truest sense, 
would turn mechanics at once; that is, they 
would do the thing they were born to do, and 
they would respect that thing, and make every 
one else respect it. 

While the definition of a poet and a gentle- 
man — that he is a man who loves his work — ■ 
might appear to make a new division of society, 
it is a division that already exists in the actual 



22 The Men Behind the Machines 

life of the world, and constitutes the only literal 
aristocracy the world has ever had. 

It may be set down as a fundamental prin- 
ciple that, no matter how prosaic a man may be, 
or how proud he is of having been born upon this 
planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the 
very essence of the most hard and practical man 
that, as regards the one uppermost thing in his 
life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is 
a poet in spite of himself, and whether he knows 
it or not. 

So long as the thing a man works with is a 
part of an inner ideal to him, so long as he makes 
the thing he works with express that ideal, the 
heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty 
and the unconquerableness of that man, and of 
that man's delight, shall be upon all that he 
does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to 
all on earth who overhear heaven. 

Every man who loves his work, who gets his 
work and his ideal connected, who makes his 
work speak out the heart of him, is a poet. It 
makes little difference what he says about it. 
In proportion as he has power with a thing; in 
proportion ac he makes the thing — be it a bit of 
color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, 
or a wheel, or a throttle — in proportion as he 
makes the thing fulfill or express what he wants 
it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven 
and earth cannot make him otherwise. 



Gentlemen 23 

That the inventor is in all essential respects 
a poet toward the machine that he has made, it 
would be hard to deny. That, with all the 
apparent prose that piles itself about his 
machine, the machine is in all essential respects 
a poem to him, who can question? Who has 
ever known an inventor, a man with a passion 
in his hands, without feeling toward him as he 
feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to 
know that men are living now under the same 
sky with us, hundreds of them (their faces haunt 
us on the street), who would all but die, who 
are all but dying now, this very moment, to 
make a machine live, — martyrs of valves and 
wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, 
tireless, unconquerable men? 

To know an inventor the moment of his 
triumph, — the moment when, working his will 
before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent, 
massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the 
gaze of men's souls and the needs of their 
bodies, — to know an inventor at all is to know 
that at a moment like this a chord is touched in 
him strange and deep, soft as from out of all 
eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and 
that Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon 
his hands, standing and watching it there. It is 
the same song that from pride to pride and joy 
to joy has been singing through the hearts of 
The Men Who Make, from the beginning of the 



24 The Men Behind the Machines 

world. The thing that was not, that now is. 
after all the praying with his hands . . 
iron and wood and rivet and cog and wheel — is 
it not more than these to him standing before it 
there? It is the face of matter — who does 
not know it? — answering the face of the man, 
whispering to him out of the dust of the earth. 

What is true of the men who make the 
machines is equally true of the men who live with 
them. The brakeman and the locomotive 
engineer and the mechanical engineer and the 
sailor all have the same spirit. Their days are 
invested with the same dignity and aspiration, 
the same unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forget- 
fulness in the work itself. They begin their lives 
as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and 
wheels, or of great waters. 

As I stood by the track the other night, 
Michael the switchman was holding the road 
for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag, 
and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. 
As it rumbled by him, headhght, clatter, and 
smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every 
brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, 
at the jolt of the switch, started, as at some 
greeting out of the dark, and turned and gave 
the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave 
it. Then we watched them, Michael and I, out 
of the roar and the hiss of their splendid cloud, 
their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, 



Gentlemen 25 

flying out to the Night, until there was nothing 
but a dull red murmur and the falling of smoke. 

Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the 
rails. He put up the foot that was left from 
the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had 
been a brakeman himself. 

Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, 
in the ordinary sense, but they love a railroad 
as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given 
to brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the 
world as it passes by that their ideals are 
beautiful. They give their Hves for them, — 
hundreds of lives a year. These Hves may be 
sordid lives looked at from the outside, but 
mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and 
gHstening lights, roar, dust, and water, and 
death, and life, — these play their endless spell 
upon them. They love the shining of the track. 
It is wrought into the very fibre of their being. 

Years pass and years, and still more years. 
Who shall persuade the brakemen to leave the 
track? They never leave it. I shall always see 
them — on their flying footboards beneath the 
sky — swaying and rocking — still swaying and 
rocking — to Eternity. 

They are men who live down through to the 
spirit and the poetry of their calling. It is the 
poetry of the calling that keeps them there. 

Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but 
our one peephole in the universe, that we may 



26 The Men Behind the Machines 

see IT withal ; but if we love it enough and stand 
close to it enough, we breathe the secret and 
touch in our lives the secret that throbs through 
it all. 

For a man to have an ideal in this world, for 
a man to know what an ideal is, even though 
nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and 
a life in a switch-house, and the signal of com- 
rades whirling by, this also is to have lived. 

The fact that the railroad has the same 
fascination for the railroad man that the sea has 
for the sailor is not a mere item of interest per- 
taining to human nature. It is a fact that per- 
tains to the art of the present day, and to the 
future of its literature. It is as much a symbol 
of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses 
is a symbol of the art of an heroic age. 

That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, 
with all his hardships, to turn his back upon the 
sea is a fact a great many thousand years old. 
We find it accounted for not only in the observa- 
tion and experience of men, but in their art. It 
was rather hard for them to do it at first (as with 
many other things), but even the minor poets 
have admitted the sea into poetry. The sea 
was allowed in poetry before mountains were 
allowed in it. It has long been an old story. 
When the sailor has grown too stiff to cHmb the 
masts he mends sails on the decks. Everybody 
understands — even the commonest people and 



Gentlemen 27 

the minor poets understand — why it is that a 
sailor, when he is old and bent and obHged to be 
a landsman to die, does something that holds 
him close to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes 
where he can see the sails. If he must tend 
flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and 
when he selects a place for his grave, it is where 
surges shall be heard at night singing to his 
bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this. 
There is not a passenger on the Empire State 
Express, this moment, being whirled to the West, 
who could not write a sonnet on it, — not a man 
of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying 
through space behind the set and splendid 
hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and write 
a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A 
crowd on the street could write a poem on 
a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he 
was dead), and now that sailors enough have 
died in the course of time to bring the feeling of 
the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still 
alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen 
how many wrecks it is going to take, lists of 
killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns 
of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate 
the spiritual safe where poets are keeping their 
souls to-day, untouched of the world, and bring 
home to them some sense of the adventure and 
quiet splendor and unparalleled expressiveness 
of the engineer's Hfe. He is a man who would 



28 The Men Behind the Machines 

rather be without a Hfe (so long as he has his 
nerve) than to have to Hve one without an 
engine, and when he cUmbs down from the old 
girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is 
to linger where she is. He watches the track as 
a sailor watches the sea. He spends his old age 
in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in 
and out, one always sees him sitting in the sun 
there until he dies, and talking with them. 
Nothing can take him away. 

Does any one know an engineer who has not 
all but a personal affection for his engine, who 
has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her 
breath with his will does not put his hand upon 
the throttle of that ideal and make that ideal say 
something? Woe to the poet who shall seek to 
define down or to sing away that ideal. In its 
glory, in darkness or in day, we are hid from 
death. It is the protection of life. The en- 
gineer who is not expressing his whole soul in 
his engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, 
is not worthy to place his hand upon an engine's 
throttle. Indeed, who is he — this man — that 
this awful privilege should be allowed to him, 
that he should dare to touch the motor nerve 
of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour 
muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a 
man like this, climbing the hills for him, circling 
the globe for him? It is impossible to believe 
that an engineer — a man who with a single touch 



Gentlemen 29 

sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as 
an empty wind can go, or as a pigeon swings her 
wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the west — does 
not mean something by it, does not love to do it 
because he means something by it. If ever 
there was a poet, the engineer is a poet. In his 
dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brother- 
hood, hastener of men from the ends of the 
earth that they may be as one, I always see him, 
— ceaseless — tireless — flying past sleep — out 
through the Night — thundering down the edge 
of the world, into the Dawn. 

Who am I that it should be given to me to 
make a word on my lips to speak, or to make a 
thing that shall be beautiful with my hands — 
that I should stand by my brother's life and gaze 
on his trembling track — and not feel what the 
engine says as it plunges past, about the man in 
the cab ? What matters it that he is a wordless 
man, that he wears not his heart in a book? 
Are not the bell and the whistle and the cloud 
of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his 
eyes words enough? They are the signals of 
this man's life beckoning to my life. Standing 
in his engine there, making every wheel of that 
engine thrill to his will, he is the priest of wonder 
to me, and of the terror of the splendor of the 
beauty of power. The train is the voice of his 
life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of 
strength. It is as the singing a man would sing 



30 The Men Behind the Machines 

who felt his hand on the throttle of things. The 
engine is a soul to me — soul of the quiet face 
thundering past — leading its troop of glories 
echoing along the hills, telling it to the flocks 
in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it 
to the trees and the buds and the little, trem- 
bling growing things, that the might of the spirit 
of man has passed that way. 

If an engine is to be looked at from the point 
of view of the man who makes it and who knows 
it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a right to be 
taken, in the nature of things, as being an ex- 
pression of the human spirit, as being that 
man's way of expressing the human spirit, there 
shall be no escape for the children of this present 
world, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the 
strong delight in it that shall hem life in, and 
bound it round on every side. The idealism and 
passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, 
in the feeling he has about his machine, the 
power with which that machine expresses that 
feeling, is one of the great typical living inspira- 
tions of this modem age, a fragment of the new 
apocalypse, vast and inarticulate and far and 
faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now 
from above, and now from below, and on every 
side of life. It is as though the very ground 
itself should speak, — speak to our poor, pitiful, 
unspiritual, matter-despising souls, — should 
command them to come forth, to live, to gaze 



Gentlemen 31 

into the heart of matter for the heart of God. It 
is so that the very dullest of us, standing among 
our machines, can hardly otherwise than guess 
the coming of some vast surprise, — the coming 
of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, 
our sons and daughters shall prophesy, and our 
young men shall see visions, and our old men 
shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I 
do not dare to say it. What it means to our 
rehgion and to our Ufe and to our art, this great 
athletic upHft of the world, I do not know. I 
only know that so long as the fine arts, in an 
age hke this, look down on the mechanical arts 
there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so 
long as the church worships the laborer's God, 
but does not reverence labor, there shall be no 
religion in it for men to-day, and none for women 
and children to-morrow. I only know that so 
long as there is no poet amongst us, who can put 
himself into a word, as this man, my brother 
the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, 
the engine shall remove mountains, and the word 
of the poet shall not ; it shall be buried beneath 
the mountains. I only know that so long as we 
have more preachers who can be hired to stop 
preaching or to go into Hfe insurance than we 
have engineers who can be hired to leave their 
engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in 
engine cabs than in pulpits, — the vestibule trains 
shall say deeper things than sermons say. In 



32 The Men Behind the Machines 

the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along 
the rails, we shall find again the worship we have 
lost in church, the worship we fain would find in 
the simpered prayers and paid praises of a 
thousand choirs, — the worship of the creative 
spirit, the beholding of a fragment of creation 
morning, the watching of the delight of a man in 
the delight of God, — in the first and last delight 
of God. I have made a vow in my heart. I 
shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every 
word have the joy of God and of fathers and 
mothers in it. And so long as men are more 
creative and godlike in engines than they are 
in sermons, I listen to engines. 

Would to God it were otherwise. But so it 
shall be with all of us. So it cannot but be. 
Not until the day shall come when this wistful, 
blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding 
great and bitter love, with all her proud and 
solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of life 
sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall 
she be worshipful; not until the love of all life 
and the love of all love is her love, not until 
all faces are her faces, not until the face of the en- 
gineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand 
souls, is beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is 
beautiful or a stained glass window is beautiful, 
shall the church be beautiful. That day is 
bound to come. If the church will not do it 
with herself, the great rough hand of the world 



Gentlemen 33 

shall do it with the church. That day of the 
new church shall be known by men because it 
will be a day in which all worship shall be 
gathered into her worship, in which her holy 
house shall be the comradeship of all delights 
and of all masteries under the sun, and all the 
masteries and all the delights shall be laid at her 
feet. 



VI 

PROPHETS 

THE world follows the creative spirit. 
Where the spirit is creating, the strong 
and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit 
is not in poetry, poetry will call itself something 
else. If it is not in the church, religion will call 
itself something else. It is the business of a 
living religion, not to wish that the age it lives 
in were some other age, but to tell what the age 
is for, and what every man bom in it is for. A 
church that can see only what a few of the men 
bom in an age are for, can help only a few. If 
a church does not believe in a particular man 
more than he believes in himself, the less it tries 
to do for him the better. If a church does not 
believe in a man's work as he believes in it, does 
not see some divine meaning and spirit in it 
and give him honor and standing and dignity 
for the divine meaning in it ; if it is a church in 
which labor is secretly despised and in which it 
is openly patronized, in which a man has more 
34 



Prophets 35 

honor for working feebly with his brain than for 
working passionately and perfectly with his 
hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. 
It is excommunicated by the will of Heaven 
and the nature of things, from the only Com- 
munion that is large enough for a man to belong 
to or for a God to bless. 

If there is one sign rather than another of 
religious possibility and spiritual worth in the 
men who do the world's work with machines 
to-day, it is that these men are never persuaded 
to attend a church that despises that work. 

Symposiums on how to reach the masses are 
pitiless irony. There is no need for symposiums. 
It is an open secret. It cries upon the house- 
tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath 
bells. A church that believes less than the 
world beUeves shall lose its leadership in the 
world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the 
man who sings with his hands, "to men who do 
.not believe in me, to worship, with men \7ho 
do not believe in me, a God that does not believe 
in me?" If heaven itself (represented as a rich 
and idle place, — seats free in the evening) were 
opened to the true laboring man on the condi- 
tion that he should despise his hands by holding 
palms in them, he would find some excuse for 
staying away. He feels in no wise different with 
regard to his present life. "Unless your God," 
says the man who sings with his hands, to those 



36 The Men Behind the Machines 

who pity him and do him good, — "unless your 
God is a God I can worship in a factory, He is 
not a God I care to worship in a church." 

Behold it is written: The church that does not 
delight in these men and in what these men are 
for, as much as the street delights in them, shall 
give way to the street. The street is more beau- 
tiful. If the street is not let into the church, it 
shall sweep over the church and sweep around it, 
shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above 
it. From the roofs of labor — radiant and beau- 
tiful labor — shall men look down upon its 
towers. Only a church that believes more than 
the world believes shall lead the world. It 
always leads the world. It cannot help leading 
it. The religion that lives in a machine age, 
and that cannot see and feel, and make others 
see and feel, the meaning of that machine age, 
is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not 
worthy of our machines. One of the machines 
we have made could make a better religion than 
this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost 
every town or city where one goes, if one will 
stop or look up or listen, one hears the chim- 
neys teaching the steeples. It would be blind 
for more than a few years more to be dis- 
couraged about modern religion. The tele- 
phone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and 
all the other great believers are singing up 
around it. The very railroads are surrounding 



Prophets 37 

it and taking care of it. A few years more 
and the steeples will stop hesitating and totter- 
ing in the sight of all the people. They will no 
longer stand in fear before what the crowds 
of chimneys and railways and the miles of 
smokestacks sweeping past are saying to the 
people. 

They will listen to what the smokestacks are 
saying to the people. 

They will say it better. 

In the meantime they are not listening. 

Religion and art at the present moment, 
both blindfolded and both with their ears 
,*topped, are being swept to the same irrevocable 
issue. By all poets and prophets the same 
danger signal shall be seen spreading before them 
both jogging along their old highways. It is the 
arm that reaches across the age. 

RAILROAD CROSSING ' 

LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE! 



PART II. 
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES 



THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES. 
I 

AS GOOD AS OURS 

ONE is always hearing it said that if a thing 
is to be called poetic it must have great 
ideas in it, and must successfully express them. 
The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has 
to meet the objection that, while a machine may 
have great ideas in it, "it does not look it." The 
average machine not only fails to express the idea 
that it stands for, but it generally expresses 
something else. The language of the average 
machine, when one considers what it is for, what 
it is actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or 
feeble. It is often absurd. It is a rare machine 
which, when one looks for poetry in it, does not 
make itself ridiculous. 

The only answer that can be made to this 
objection is that a steam-engine (when one 
thinks of it) really expresses itself as well as the 
rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and 
absurd. We live in an organically inexpressible 
world. The language of everything in it is 
41 



42 The Language of the Machines 

absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the 
universe over our heads — with its cunning Httle 
stars in it — is the height of absurdity, as a self- 
expression. The sky laughs at us. We know 
it when we look in a telescope. Time and space 
are God's jokes. Looked at strictly in its outer 
language, the whole visible world is a joke. To 
suppose that God has ever expressed Himself 
to us in it, or to suppose that He could express 
Himself in it, or that any one can express any- 
thing in it, is not to see the point of the joke. 

We cannot even express ourselves to one an- 
other. The language of everything we use or 
touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do 
our living with — even the things that human be- 
ings amuse themselves with — are inexpressive 
and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and foot- 
ball have all been accused in turn, by people 
who do not know them from the inside, of being 
meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey 
anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight 
of a golf-stick lying on a seat is a feeling to the 
one to whom it belongs, a play of sense and 
spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The 
same is true of a new fiery-red baby, which, con- 
sidering the fuss that is made about it, to a 
comparative outsider like a small boy, has 
always been from the beginning of the world a 
ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could 
not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his 



As Good as Ours 43 

time to it, of a more futile, reckless, hapless ex- 
pression of or pointer to an immortal soul than 
a week-old baby wailing at time and space. 
The idea of a baby may be all right, but in its 
outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a failure, 
and always has been. The same is true of our 
other musical instruments. A horn caricatures 
music. A flute is a man rubbing a black stick 
with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. 
We listen solemnly to the violin — the voice of 
an archangel with a board tucked under his chin 
—and to Girardi's 'cello— a whole human race 
laughing and crying and singing to us between 
a boy's legs. The eye-language of the violin 
has to be interpreted, and only people who are 
cultivated enough to suppress whole parts of 
themselves (rather useful and important parts 
elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera— a huge 
conspiracy of symboHsm, every visible thing in 
it standing for something that can not be seen, 
beckoning at something that cannot be heard.' 
Nothing could possibly be more grotesque, 
looked at from the outside or by a tourist from 
another planet or another religion, than the 
celebration of the Lord's Supper in a Protestant 
church. All things have their outer senses, and 
these outer senses have to be learned one at a 
time by being flashed through with inner ones. 
Except to people who have tried it, nothing 
could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form 



44 The Language of the Machines 

of human expression. A reception — a room- 
ful of people shouting at each other three inches 
away — is comical enough. So is handshaking. 
Looked at from the outside, what could be more 
unimpressive than the spectacle of the greatest 
dignitary of the United States put in a vise in 
his own house for three hours, having his hand 
squeezed by long rows of people? And, taken 
as a whole, scurrying about in its din, what could 
possibly be more grotesque than a great city — 
a city looked at from almost any adequate, 
respectable place for an immortal soul to look 
from — a star, for instance, or a beautiful life? 

Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels, 
every outer token that pertains to man is absurd 
and unfinished until some inner thing is put with 
it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to 
the other animals), rushing empty about space. 
New York is a spectacle for a squirrel to laugh 
at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man 
is a mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, 
desk-infesting animal. 

All these things being true of expression — both 
the expression of men and of God — the fact that 
machines which have poetry in them do not 
express it very well does not trouble me much. 
I do not forget the look of the first ocean-engine 
I ever saw — four or five stories of it; nor do I 
forget the look of the ocean engine's engineer 
as in its mighty heart-beat he stood with his 



As Good as Ours 45 

strange, happy, helpless "Twelve thousand 
horse-power, sir ! " upon his lips. 

That first night with my first engineer still 
follows me. The time seems always coming 
back to me again when he brought me up from 
his whirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of 
stars, and left me — my new wonder all stumbling 
through me — alone with them and with my 
thoughts. 

The engines breathe. 

No sound but cinders on the sails 

And the ghostly heave, 

The voice the wind makes in the mast — 

And dainty gales 

And fluffs of mist and smoking stars 

Floating past — 

From night-lit funnels. 

In the wild of the heart of God I stand. 

Time and Space 

Wheel past my face. 

Forever. Everywhere. 

I alone. 

Beyond the Here and There 



46 The Language of the Machines 

Now and Then 

Of men, 

Winds from the unknown 

Round me blow 

Blow to the unknown again. 

Out in its solitude I hear the prow 

Beyond the silence-crowded decks 

Laughing and shouting 

At Night, 

Lashing the heads and necks 

Of the lifted seas, 

That in their flight 

Urge onward 

And rise and sweep and leap and sink 

To the very brink 

Of Heaven. 

Timber and steel and smoke 

And Sleep 

Thousand-souled 

A quiver, 

A deadened thunder, 

A vague and countless creep 

Through the hold, 

The weird and dusky chariot lunges on 

Through Fate. 

From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes 

Above the houses of the deep 

Their shadowy haunches fall and rise 

—O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs 



, As Good as Ours 47 

The flying of their hoofs. 

Through the wonder and the dark 

Where skies and waters meet 

The shimmer of manes and knees 

Dust of seas . . . 

The sound of breathing, urge, confusion 

And the beat, the starlight beat 

Soft and far and stealthy-fleet 

Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet. 



II 

ON BEING BUSY AND STILL 

ONE of the hardest things about being an 
inventor is that the machines (excepting 
the poorer ones) never show ofE. The first time 
that the phonograph (whose talking had been 
rumored of many months) was allowed to talk 
in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, 
New Jersey, and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, 
everybody laughed. Instead of being impressed 
with the real idea of the phonograph — being 
impressed because it could talk at all — people 
were impressed because it talked through its 
nose. 

The more modern a machine is, when a man 
stands before it and seeks to know it, — the more 
it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his 
imagination and his soul, — the less it is willing 
to appeal to the outside of him. If he will not 
look with his whole being at a twin-screw 
steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under 
water. This is one of the chief characteristics 
48 



On Being Busy and Still 49 

of the modern world, that its poetry is under 
water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering 
around in the big seas, pounding the air and 
water both with her huge, showy paddles, is 
not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the 
poetry in the sailboat is not so obvious, so 
plainly on top, as in a gondola. 

People who do not admit poetry in machinery 
in general admit that there is poetry in a Dutch 
windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A 
Dutch windmill flourishes. The American wind- 
mill, being improved so much that it does not 
flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it at 
all. The same general principle holds good 
with every machine that has been invented. 
The more the poet — that is, the inventor — 
works on it, the less the poetry in it shows. 
Progress in a modern machine, if one watches it 
in its various stages, always consists in making 
a machine stop posing and get down to work. 
The earlier locomotive, puffing helplessly along 
with a few cars on its crooked rails, was much 
more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque 
than the present one, and the locomotive that 
came next, while very different, was more im- 
pressive than the present one. Every one 
remembers it, — the important-looking, bell- 
headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty 
years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits 
and its ceaseless water-drinking habits, with its 



50 The Language of the Machines 

grim, spreading cowcatcher and its huge plug- 
hat — who does not remember it — fussing up and 
down stations, ringing its bell forever and 
whistling at everything in sight? It was im- 
possible to travel on a train at all thirty years 
ago without always thinking of the locomotive. 
It shoved itself at people. It was always doing 
things— now at one end of the train and now at 
the other, ringing its bell down the track, blow- 
ing in at the windows, it fumed and spread 
enough in hauling three cars from Boston to 
Concord to get to Chicago and back. It was 
the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines were 
made. One takes a train from New York to 
San Francisco now, and scarcely knows there is 
an engine on it. All he knows is that he is 
going, and sometimes the going is so good he 
hardly knows that. 

The modem engines, the short-necked, pin- 
headed, large-limbed, silent ones, plunging with 
smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of 
space — engines without any faces, blind, grim, 
conquering, lifting the world — are more poetic 
to some of us than the old engines were, for the 
very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. 
They are less showy, more furtive, suggestive, 
modem and perfect. 

In proportion as a machine is modem it hides 
its face. It refuses to look as poetic as it is; 
and if it makes a sound, it is almost always a 



On Being Busy and Still 51 

sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs 
to some one else. The trolley-wire, lifting a 
whole city home to supper, is a giant with a 
falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic- 
sounding, is not characteristic of the modern 
spirit. In so far as it exists at all in the modem 
age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it 
exists because it is accidental or left over. There 
was a deep bass steamer on the Mississippi once, 
with a very small head of steam, which any one 
would have admitted had poetry in it — old- 
fashioned poetry. Every time it whistled it 
stopped. 



Ill 

ON NOT SHOWING OFF 

IT is not true to say that the modern man 
does not care for poetry. He does not care 
for poetry that bears on — or for eloquent poetry. 
He cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old 
sense he does not care for eloquence in anything. 
The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks 
to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned 
down. Votes are facts, and if the votes are to 
be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The 
doctor who stands best with the typical modern 
patient is not the most agreeable, sociable, 
jogging-about man a town contains, like the 
doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He 
even prescribes less, and the reason that it is 
hard to be a modem minister (already cut down 
from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty 
minutes) is that one has to practise more than 
one can preach. 

To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, 
to stand for more than one says or looks — the 
52 



On Not Showing Off 53 

little girl with her loom clothing twelve hundred 
people. People like it. They are used to it. 
All life around them is filled with it. The old- 
fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out in the 
modem church because it is a mere specialty 
in modem life. The prayer-meeting recognizes 
but one way of praying, and people who have a 
gift for praying that way go, but the majority of 
people — people who have discovered that there 
are a thousand other ways of praying, and who 
like them better — stay away. 

When the telegraph machine was first thought 
of, the words all showed on the outside. When 
it was improved it became inner and subtle. 
The messages were read by sound. Everything 
we have which improves at all improves in the 
same way. The exterior conception of right- 
eousness of a hundred years ago — namely, that 
a man must do right because it is his duty — is 
displaced by the modem one, the morally 
thorough one — namely, that a man must do 
right because he likes it — do it from the inside. 
The more improved righteousness is, the less it 
shows on the outside. The more modem 
righteousness is, the more it looks like selfishness, 
the better the modem world likes it, and the more 
it counts. 

On the whole, it is against a thing rather than 
in its favor, in the twentieth century, that it 
looks large. Time was when if it had not been 



54 The Language of the Machines 

known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered 
heaven with a glass three feet long, men would 
have said that it would hardly do to discover 
heaven with anything less than six hundred 
feet long. To the ancients, Galileo's instrument, 
even if it had been practical, would not have 
been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, how- 
ever, the fact that Galileo's star-tool was three 
feet long, that he carried a new heaven about 
with him in his hands, was half the poetry and 
wonder of it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking 
as the six-hundred-foot telescope invented later, 
which never worked. 

Nothing could be more impressive than the 

original substantial R typewriter. One felt, 

every time he touched a letter, as if he must 
have said a sentence. It was like saying things 
with pile-drivers. The machine obtruded itself 
at every point. It flourished its means and 
ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One 
commenced every new line with his foot. 

The same general principle may be seen run- 
ning alike through machinery and through life. 
The history of man is traced in water-wheels. 
The overshot wheel belonged to a period when 
everything else — religion, literature, and art — 
was overshot. When, as time passed on, com- 
mon men began to think, began to think under 
a little, the Reformation came in — and the 
undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There 



On Not Showing Off 55 

is no denying that the overshot wheel is more 
poetic-looking—it does its work with twelve 
quarts of water at a time and shows every quart 
— but it soon develops into the undershot wheel, 
which shows only the drippings of the water, 
and the undershot wheel develops into the 
turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of 
sight— except its work. The water in the six 
turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand 
horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive 
and poetic-looking as six turbine wheels' worth 
of water would be — wasted and going over the 
Falls. 

The main fact about the modern man as 
regards poetry is, that he prefers poetry that 
has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It 
is because most of the poetry the modem man 
gets a chance to see to-day is merely going over 
the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal 
to the modern man. He supposes so himself. 
He supposes that a dynamo (forty street-cars on 
forty streets, flying through the dark) is not 
poetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, 
spellbound, more than any poetry that is being 
written. The things that are hidden — the 
things that are spiritual and wondering — 
are the ones that appeal to him. The idle, 
foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He 
gropes in his own body silently, harmlessly 
with the X-ray, and watches with awe the beat- 



56 The Language of the Machines 

ing of his heart. He glories in inner essences, 
both in his Hfe and in his art. He is the disciple 
of the X-ray, the defier of appearances. Why- 
should a man who has seen the inside of matter 
care about appearances, either in little things or 
great? Or why argue about the man, or argue 
about the man's God, or quibble with words? 
Perhaps he is matter. Perhaps he is spirit. 
If he is spirit, he is matter-loving spirit, and if 
he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter. Every 
time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes 
it (as God makes mountains out of sunlight) 
a material thing. Every time he touches a 
material thing, in proportion as he touches it 
mightily he brings out inner light in it. He 
spiritualizes it. He abandons the glistening 
brass knocker — pleasing symbol to the outer 
sense — for a tiny knob on his porch door and a 
far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass 
knocker does not appeal to the spirit enough 
for the modem man, nor to the imagination. He 
wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door- 
bell with. He loves to wake the unseen. He 
will not even ring a door-bell if he can help it. 
He likes it better, by touching a button, to have 
a door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals 
down in his cellar chewing each other. He 
likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs with 
a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He 
may be seen riding in three stories along his 



On Not Showing Off 57 

streets, but he takes his engines all ofiE the tracks 
and crowds them into one engine and puts it out 
of sight. The more a thing is out of the sight 
of his eyes the more his soul sees it and glories 
in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden 
water spouts over his head and pours beneath 
his feet through his house. Hidden hght creeps 
through the dark in it. The more might, the 
more subtlety. He hauls the whole human 
race around the crust of the earth with a 
vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids — 
sixty miles an hour — with invisible air. He 
photographs the tone of his voice on a platinum 
plate. His voice reaches across death with the 
platinum plate. He is heard of the unborn, 
If he speaks in either one of his worlds he takes 
two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut 
in with one. If he lives in either he wraps the 
other about him. He makes men walk on air. 
He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks 
open mountains with gas. The more perfect 
he makes his machines the more spiritual they 
are, the more their power hides itself. The 
more the machines of the man loom in human 
life the more they reach down into silence, and 
into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. 
The infinity which is the man's infinity is their 
infinity. The machines grasp all space for 
him. They lean out on ether. They are the 
man's machines. The man has made them and 



58 The Language of the Machines 

the man worships with them. From the first 
breath of flame, burning out the secret of the 
Dust to the last shadow of the dust — the breath- 
less, soundless shadow of the dust, which he 
calls electricity — the man worships the invis- 
ible, the intangible. Electricity is his prophet. 
It sums him up. It sums up his modern world 
and the religion and the arts of his modern 
world. Out of all the machines that he has 
made the electric machine is the most modern 
because it is the most spiritual. The empty 
and futile look of a trolley wire does not trouble 
the modem man. It is his instinctive expres- 
sion of himself. All the habits of electricity 
are his habits. Electricity has the modern 
man's temperament — the passion of being in- 
visible and irresistible. The electric machine 
fills him with brotherhood and delight. It is 
the first of the machines that he can not help 
seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the 
man's highest self. His own soul beckons to 
him out of it. 

And the more electricity grows the more like 
the man it grows, the more spirit-like it is. The 
telegraph wire around the globe is melted into 
the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit 
break away from the dust. They envelop 
the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at last, 
unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light 
of stars, — fights its way to God. 



On Not Showing Off 59 

The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless 
ground or through the froth of heaven for the 
spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which 
makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless tele- 
graph, which makes earth out of air, he delves 
into the deepest sea as a cloud. He strides 
heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment 
at last of Electricity — the archangel of matter. 



IV 

ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD 

RELIGION consists in being proud of the 
Creator. Poetry is largely the same feeling 
— -a kind of personal joy one takes in the way 
the world is made and is being made every 
morning. The true lover of nature is touched 
with a kind of cosmic family pride every time 
he looks up from his work — ^sees the night and 
morning, still and splendid, hanging over him. 
Probably if there were another universe than 
this one, to go and visit in, or if there were an 
extra Creator we could go to — some of us — and 
boast about the one we have, it would afford 
infinite relief among many classes of people — 
especially poets. 

The most common sign that poetry, real 
poetry, exists in the modern human heart is 
the pride that people are taking in the world. 
The typical modern man, whatever may be said 
or not said of his religion, of his attitude 
toward the maker of the world, has regular and 

Go 



Making People Proud of the World 6i 

almost daily habits of being proud of the world. 

In the twentieth century the best way for a 
man to worship God is going to be to realize 
his own nature, to recognize what he is for, and 
be a god, too. We believe to-day that the best 
recognition of God consists in recognizing the 
fact that he is not a mere God who does divine 
things himself, but a God who can make others 
do them. 

Looked at from the point of view of a mere 
God who does divine things himself, an earth- 
quake, for instance, may be called a rather 

feeble affair, a slight jar to a ball going • 

miles an hour — a Creator could do little less, if 
He gave a bare thought to it — but when I waked 
a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in 
my own house as if it were a hammock, and was 
told that some men down in Hazardville, Con- 
necticut, had managed to shake the planet like 
that, with some gunpowder they had made, I 

felt a new respect for Messrs. and Co. 

I was proud of man, my brother. Does he 
not shake loose the Force of Gravity — make 
the very hand of God to tremble? To his 
thoughts the very hills, with their hearts of 
stone, make soft responses — when he thinks 
them. 

The Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in '76, 
under its sky of iron and glass, is remembered by 
many people the day they saw it first as one of 



62 The Language of the Machines 

the great experiences of life. Like some vast, 
Titanic spirit, soul of a thousand, thousand 
wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mighty silence 
there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve- 
year-old boy, at least, the thought of the hour he 
spent with that engine first is a thought he sings 
and prays with to this day. His lips trembled 
before it. He sought to hide himself in its 
presence. Why had no one ever taught him 
anything before? As he looks back through his 
life there is one experience that stands out by 
itself in all those boyhood years — -the choking in 
his throat — the strange grip upon him — upon 
his body and upon his soul — as of some awful 
unseen Hand reaching down Space to him, draw- 
ing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed 
child being held up before It — held up to an 
infinite fact, that he might look at it again and 
again. 

The first conception of what the life of man 
was like, of what it might be like, came to at 
least one immortal soul not from lips that he 
loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice 
behind a desk, but from a machine. To this 
day that Corliss engine is the engine of dreams, 
the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and 
to the soul. It rebuilds the universe. It is the 
opportunity of beauty throughout life, the 
symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of 
the unity of nations, and of the worship of God. 



Making People Proud of the World 63 

In silence — like the soft far running of the sky — 
it wrought upon him there; Hke some heroic 
human spirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, 
through miles of aisles, and crowds of gazers, 
it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as 
the beat and rhythm of the heart of man mas- 
tering matter, of the clay conquering God. 

Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices 
surrounded me. It was the first hearing of the 
psalm of hfe. The hum and murmur of it was 
Hke the spell of ages upon me; and the vision 
that floated in it — nay, the vision thatwasbuilded 
in it — was the vision of the age to be: the vision 
of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and 
dance and drone of his sad four thousand years, 
lifting himself to the stature of his soul at last, 
lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, 
and with the wind, and the heat and the light, 
into comradeship with Creation morning, and 
into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion) 
of the might and gentleness of God. 

There seem to be two ways to worship Him. 
One way is to gaze upon the great Machine that 
He has made, to watch it running softly above 
us all, moonhght and starlight, and winter and 
summer, rain and snowflakes, and growing 
things. Another way is to worship Him not 
only because He has made the vast and still 
machine of creation, in the beating of whose 
days and nights we live our lives, but because 



64 The Language of the Machines 

He has made a Machine that can make machines 
— because out of the dust of the earth He has 
made a Machine that shall take more of the dust 
of the earth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd 
it into steel and iron and say, "Go ye now, 
depths of the earth— heights of heaven — serve 
ye me. I, too, am God. Stones and mists, 
winds and waters and thunder — the spirit that 
is in thee is my spirit. I also — even I also — am 
God!" 



A MODEST UNIVERSE 

I have heard it objected that a machine does 
not take hold of a man with its great ideas 
while he stands and watches it. It does not 
make him feel its great ideas. And therefore 
it is denied that it is poetic. 

The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts 
of machinery is not denied. What seems to be 
lacking in the machines from the artistic point 
of view at present is a mere knack of making 
the facts plain and literal-looking. Grasshop- 
pers would be more appreciated by more people 
if they were made with microscopes on, — either 
the grasshoppers or the people. 

If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop 

could be made plain and large enough, there is 

not a man living who would not be impressed 

by it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might 

65 



66 The Language of the Machines 

quite as easily have been) 640 feet high, the huge 
beams of their legs above their bodies towering 
like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity 
of a grasshopper's machinery — the huge levers 
of it, his hops across valleys from mountain to 
mountain, shadowing fields and villages — would 
have been one of the impressive features of 
human life. Everybody would be willing to 
admit of the mere machinery of a grasshopper, 
(if there were several acres of it) that there was 
creative sublimity in it. They would admit 
that the bare idea of having such a stately piece 
of machinery in a world at all, slipping softly 
around on it, was an idea with creative sublim- 
ity in it; and yet these same people because the 
sublimity, instead of being spread over several 
acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, 
are not impressed by it. 

But it is objected, it is not merely a matter 
of spiritual size. There is something more than 
plainness lacking in the symbolism of machinery. 
"The symbolism of machinery is lacking in 
fitness. It is not poetic." "A thing can only 
be said to be poetic in proportion as its form 
expresses its nature." Mechanical inventions 
may stand for impressive facts, but such inven- 
tions, no matter how impressive the facts may 
be, cannot be called poetic unless their form 
expresses those facts. A horse plunging and 
champing his bits on the eve of battle, for in- 



A Modest Universe 67 

stance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box 
full of dynamite, with a spark creeping toward 
it, is not. 

That depends partly on the man and partly 
on the spark. A man may not be impressed by 
a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping 
toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second 
time he sees it, if he has time, he is impressed 
enough. He does not stand and criticise the 
lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to 
remember the day when he all but lost his life 
because 

A pill-box by the river's brim 
A simple pill-box was to him 
And nothing more. 

Wordsworth in these memorable lines has 
summed up and brought to an issue the whole 
matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has 
its language, and the power of feeling what a 
thing means, by the way it looks, is a matter of 
experience — of learning the language. The lan- 
guage is there. The fact that the language of 
the machine is a new language, and a strangely 
subtle one, does not prove that it is not a lan- 
guage, that its symbolism is not good, and 
that there is not poetry in machinery. 

The inventor need not be troubled because in 
making his machine it does not seem to express. 
It is written that neither you nor I, comrade 



68 The Language of the Machines 

nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, 
nor God's machine, in this world shall express 
or be expressed. If it is the meaning of life to 
us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we 
are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dot- 
ting a star awhile, creeping about on it. warmed 
by a heater ninety-five million miles away. 
The machine of the universe itself, does not ex- 
press its Inventor. It does not even express the 
men who are under it. The ninety-five mil- 
lionth mile waits on us silently, at the door- 
ways of our souls night and day, and we wait on 
It. Is it not There? Is it not Here — this 
ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs 
in our veins. Why should Man — a being who 
can live forever in a day, who is born of a bound- 
less birth, who takes for his fireside the im- 
measurable — express or expect to be expressed? 
What we would like to be — even what we are — 
who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to 
dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, 
resistlessly on, over the pantomime within us. 
We and our machines, both, hewing away on 
the infinite, beckon and are still. 

I am not troubled because the machines do 
not seem to express themselves. I do not know 
that they can express themselves. I know that 
when the day is over, and strength is spent, and 
my soul looks out upon the great plain — upon 
the soft, night-blooming cities, with their huge 



A Modest Universe 69 

machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out 
upon me. I rest. 

I know that when I stand before a foundry- 
hammering out the floors of the world, clashing 
its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my 
soul to it, and in some way— I know not how — • 
while it sings to me I grow strong and glad. 



PART THREE 
THE MACHINES AS POETS 



THE MACHINES AS POETS 



PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS 

1HAVE an old friend who lives just around the 
corner from one of the main lines of travel 
in New England, and whenever I am passing near 
by and the railroads let me, I drop in on him 
awhile and quarrel about art. It 's a good old- 
fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation 
we have generally, the kind people used to have 
more than they do now — sketchy and not too 
wise — the kind that makes one think of things 
one wishes one had said, afterward. 

We always drift a little at first, as if of course 
we could talk about other things if we wanted 
to, but we both know, and know every time, 
that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a dis- 
cussion of the Things That Are Beautiful and 
the Things That Are Not. 

Brim thinks that I have picked out more things 
to be beautiful than I have a right to, or than 
any man has, and he is trying to put a stop to it. 
He thinks that there are enough beautiful things 
in this world that have been beautiful a long 

73 



74 The Machines as Poets 

while, without having people — well, people like 
me. for instance, poking blindly around among 
all these modern brand-new things hoping that 
in spite of appearances there is something one can 
do with them that will make them beautiful 
enough to go with the rest. I 'm afraid Brim 
gets a little personal in talking with me at times 
and I might as well say that, while disagreeing 
in a conversation with Brim does not lead to 
calling names it does seem to lead logically to 
one's going away, and trying to find afterwards, 
some thing that is the matter with him. 

"The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is," I 
say (on paper, afterwards, as the train speeds 
away), "that you have a false-classic or Stucco- 
Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, 
would have liked all these things — trolley cars, 
cables, locomotives, — seen the beautiful in them, 
if they had to do their living with them every 
day, the way we do. You would say you were 
more Greek than I am, but when one thinks of 
it, you are just going around liking the things 
the Greeks liked 3000 years ago, and I am around 
liking the things a Greek would like now, that 
is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin 
to enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way 
Plato would if he had the chance, and Alcibi- 
ades in an automobile would get a great deal 
more out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen 
in one, so far; and I suspect that if Socrates could 



Plato and the Electric Works 75 

take Bliss Carman and, say, William Watson 
around with him on a tour of the General Elec- 
tric Works in Schenectady they would n't either 
of them write sonnets about anything else for 
the rest of their natural lives. 

I can only speak for one and I do not begin 
to see the poetry in the machines that a Greek 
would see, as yet. 

But I have seen enough. 

I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this 
planet, making it small enough, welding the 
nations together before my eyes, 

I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at 
midnight with a whirl of visions, with a whirl 
of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the 
world. 

I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men 
— the five thousand of them — the grime on their 
faces and the great caldrons of melted railroad 
swinging above their heads. I have stood and 
watched them there with lightning and with 
flame hammering out the wills of cities, putting in 
the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me 
me that Bliss Carman and William Watson would 
not be ashamed of them . . , brother-artists 
every one . . in the glory . . in the dark . . . 
Vulcan -Tenny sons, blacksmiths to a planet, 
with dredges, skyscrapers, steam shovels and 
wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens 
and the earth. 



II 



HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE 
EARTH 

THE poetry of machinery to-day is a mere 
matter of fact — a part of the daily wonder 
of life to countless silent people. The next thing 
the world wants to know about machinery is 
not that there is poetry in it, but that the poetry 
which the common people have already found 
there, has a right to be there. We have the fact. 
It is the theory to put with the fact which con- 
cerns us next and which really troubles us most. 
There are very few of us, on the whole, who can 
take any solid comfort in a fact — no matter what 
it is — until we have a theory to approve of it 
with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to 
make very much difference. 

1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is 
an expression of the soul. 

2. It expresses the soul (i) of the individual 
man who creates the machine — the inventor, 
and (2) the man who lives with the machine 
the engineer. 

3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God 
who can make men who can thus express their 

76 



Hewing Away on the Heavens ']'] 

souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the 
least sense if not in Ine greatest. If a man who 
can make machines like this is not clever enough 
with all his powers to find a God, and to wor- 
ship a God, he can worship himself. It is 
because the poetry of machinery is the kind of 
poetry that does immeasurable things instead 
of immeasurably singing about them that it has 
been qmte generally taken for granted that it 
is not poetry at all. The world has learned 
more of the purely poetic idea of freedom from 
a few dumb, prosaic machines that have not 
been able to say anything beautiful about it 
than from the poets of twenty centuries. The 
machine frees a hundred thousand men and 
smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on 
freedom and has his bust in Westminster Abbey. 
The blacks in America were freed by Abraham 
Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument 
for unity — the argument against secession — was 
the locomotive. No one can fight the locomo- 
tive very long. It makes the world over into 
one world whether it wants to be one world or 
not. China is being conquered by steamships. 
It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new 
one. Seers and poets have made poetry out 
of it for two thousand years. Machinery is 
making the poetry mean something. Every 
new invention in matter that comes to us is 
a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with 



78 The Machines as Poets 

ideas. The Bessemer process has more political 
philosophy in it than was ever dreamed of in 
Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard to 
show that the invention of the sewing machine 
was one of the most literary and artistic as well 
as one of the most religious events of the nine- 
teenth century. The loom is the most beautiful 
thought that any one has ever had about Wo- 
man, and the printing press is more wonderful 
than anything that has ever been said on it. 

"This is all very true," interrupts the Logical 
Person, "about printing presses and looms and 
everything else — one could go on forever — but 
it does not prove anything. It may be true 
that the loom has made twenty readers for 
Robert Browning's poetry where Browning 
would have made but one, but it does not follow 
that because the loom has freed women for 
beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is 
a fit theme for poetry." "Besides" — ^breaks 
in the Minor Poet — "there is a difference be- 
tween a thing's being full of big ideas and its 
being beautiful. A foundry is powerful and 
interesting, but is it beautiful the way an electric 
fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?" 

This brings to a point the whole question as 
to where the definition of beauty — the boundary 
line of beauty — shall be placed. A thing's being 
considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. 
The question "Is a thing beautiful?" resolves 



Hewing Away on the Heavens 79 

itself into "How large has a beautiful thing a 
right to be?" A man's theory of beauty de- 
pends, in a universe like this, upon how much of 
the universe he will let into it. If he is afraid of 
the universe if he only lets his thoughts and 
passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to 
assume that if a beautiful thing rises into the 
sublime and immeasurable — suggests boundless 
ideas — the beauty is blurred out of it. It is 
something — there is no denying that it is some- 
thing — ^but, whatever it is or is not, it is not 
beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life 
is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets 
are dumb because they see more poetry than 
their theories have room for. The fundamental 
idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. 
Our theories of poetry were made — most of 
them — ^before infinity was discovered. 

Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity 
exists — a kind of huge, empty rim around hu- 
man life — is not a new idea to us, but the idea 
that this same infinity has or can have anything 
to do with us or with our arts, or our theories of 
art, or that we have anything to do with it, 
is an essentially modern discovery. The actual 
experience of infinity — that is, the experience 
of being infinite (comparatively speaking) — as 
in the use of machinery, is a still more modem 
discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of 
saying what modern machinery really is, than 



8o The Machines as Poets 

to say that it is a recent invention for being 
infinite. 

The machines of the world are all practically 
engaged in manufacturing the same thing. They 
are all time-and-space-machines. They knit 
time and space. Hundreds of thousands of 
things may be put in machines this very day, 
for us, before night falls, but only eternity and 
infinity shall be turned out. Sometimes it is 
called one and sometimes the other. If a man 
is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little 
difference which. It is merely a matter of form 
whether one is everywhere a few years, or any- 
where forever. A sewing machine is as much 
a means of communication as a printing press 
or a locomotive. The locomotive takes a wo- 
man around the world. The sewing machine 
gives her a new world where she is. At every 
point where a machine touches the life of a hu- 
man being, it serves him with a new measure of 
infinity. 

This would seem to be a poetic thing for a 
machine to do. Traditional poetry does not 
see any poetry in it, because, according to our 
traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an 
old, established institution in human life, and 
infinity is not. 

No one has wanted to be infinite before. 
Poetry in the ancient world was largely engaged 
in protecting people from the Infinite. They 



Hewing Away on the Heavens 8i 

were afraid of it. They could not help feeling 
that the Infinite was over them. Worship con- 
sisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people 
to forget it. With the exception of Job, the 
Hebrews almost invariably employed a poet — 
when they could get one — as a kind of trans- 
figured policeman — to keep the sky off. It was 
what was expected of poets. 

The Greeks did the same thing in a different 
way. The only difference was, that the Greeks, 
instead of employing their poets to keep the 
sky off, employed them to make it as much like 
the earth as possible — a kind of raised platform 
which was less dreadful and more familiar and 
homelike and answered the same general pur- 
pose. In other words, the sky became beautiful 
to the Greek when he had made it small enough. 
Making it small enough was the only way a 
Greek knew of making it beautiful. 

Galileo knew another way. It is because 
Galileo knew another way — ^because he knew 
that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to 
make it large enough — that men are living in a 
new world. A new religion beats down through 
space to us. A new poetry lifts away the ceil- 
ings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little 
tent of stars, its film of flame and darkness 
burning over us, has floated to the past. The 
twentieth century — the home of the Infinite- 
arches over our human lives. The heaven is 



82 The Machines as Poets 

no longer, to the sons of men, a priests' wilder- 
ness, nor is it a poet's heaven — a paper, painted 
heaven, with little painted paper stars in it, to 
hide the wilderness. 

It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these 
latter years, that has seen it crashing and break- 
ing through the old one, can deny that what is 
over us now is a new heaven ? The infinite cave 
of it, scooped out at last over our little naked, 
foolish lives, our running-about philosophies, 
our religions, and our governments — it is the 
main fact about us. Arts and literatures — ants 
under a stone, thousands of years, blind with 
light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding 
themselves. 

But not long for dreams. More than this. 
The new heaven is matched by a new earth. 
Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. 
In its cloud of steam, in a kind of splendid, 
silent stammer of praise and love, the new earth 
lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out 
of nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, 
lights darkness with falling water, makes ice 
out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws down 
Space with engines, makes years out of moments 
with machines. It is a new world and all the 
men that are born upon it are new widemov- 
ing, cloud and mountain-moving men. The 
habits of stars and waters, the huge habits of 
space and time, are the habits of the men. 



Hewing Away on the Heavens 83 

The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by 
hung over us — the mere hiding place of Death, 
the awful living-room of God — is the neighbor- 
hood of human life. 

Machinery has poetry in it because in ex- 
pressing the soul it expresses the greatest idea 
that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea 
that the soul of man is infinite, or capable of 
being infinite. 

Machinery has poetry in it also not merely 
because it is the symbol of infinite power in 
human life, or because it makes man think he 
is infinite, but because it is making him as in- 
finite as he thinks he is. The infinity of man is 
no longer a thing that the poet takes — that he 
makes an idea out of — Machinery makes it a 
matter of fact. 



Ill 

THE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE 

THE main thing the nineteenth century has 
done in hterature has been the gradual sort- 
ing out of poets into two classes — those who like 
the infinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and 
those who have not. It seems reasonable to 
say that the poets who have habits of infinity, 
of space-conquering (like our vast machines), 
who seek the suggestive and immeasurable in 
the things they see about them — poets who like 
infinity, will be the poets to whom we will have 
to look to reveal to us the characteristic and 
real poetry of this modern world. The other 
poets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the 
modem world, to say nothing of singing in it. 
They do not feel at home in it. The classic- 
walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. 
It is too savagely large, too various and un- 
speakable and unfinished. He looks at the sky 
of it — the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, 
to which it sings and lifts itself — with a strange, 



The Grudge against the Infinite 85 

cold, hidden dread down in his heart. To him 
it is a mere vast ,dizzy, dreary, troubled form- 
lessness. Its literature— its art with its in- 
finite life in it, is a blur of vagueness. He com- 
plains because mobs of images are allowed in it. 
It is full of huddled associations. When Carlyle 
appeared, the Stucco-Greek mind grudgingly 
admitted that he was 'effective.' A man who 
could use words as other men used things, who 
could put a pen down on paper in such a way as 
to lift men out from the boundaries of their lives 
and make them live in other lives and in other 
ages, who could lend them his own soul, had to 
have something said about him; something very 
good and so it was said, but he was not an 
"artist." From the same point of view and to 
the same people Browning was a mere great 
man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a 
man who went about living and loving things, 
with a few blind words opening the eyes of the 
blind. It had to be admitted that Robert 
Browning could make men who had never looked 
at their brothers' faces dwell for days in their 
souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, 
too, seer, lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of 
his violins conquering a new heaven for us, had 
great conceptions and was a musical genius 
without the slightest doubt, but he was not an 
"artist." He never worked his conceptions out. 
His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. 



86 The Machines as Poets 

They are nothing if they are not played again 
and again. For twenty or thirty years Richard 
Wagner was outlawed because his music was in- 
finitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres) . 
People seemed to want him to write cosy, home- 
like music. 



IV 

SYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART 

"So 7 drop downward from the wonderment 
Of timelessness and space, in which were blent 
The wind, the stmshine and the wanderings 
Of all the planets — to the little things 
That are my grass and flowers, and am content^. 

THIS prejudice against the infinite, or desire 
to avoid as much as possible all personal 
contact with it, betrays itself most commonly, 
perhaps, in people who have what might be called 
the domestic feeling, who consciously or un- 
consciously demand the domestic touch in a 
landscape before they are ready to call it beauti- 
ful. The typical American woman, unless she 
has unusual gifts or training, if she is left en- 
tirely to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery. 
Even if her imagination has been somewhat 
cultivated and deepened, so that she feels that 
a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in 
order to be beautiful, she still chooses nooks 
87 



SS The Machines as Poets 

and ravines, as a rule, to be happy in — places 
roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in 
with beauty on every side. She is not without 
her due respect and admiration for a mountain, 
but she does not want it to be too large, or too 
near the stars, if she has to live with it day and 
night; and if the truth were told — even at its 
best she finds a mountain distant, impersonal, 
uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she 
does not see beauty in the wide plain. There 
is something in her being that makes her bash- 
ful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she 
can snuggle up to. It is essentially the bird's 
taste in scenery. "Give me a nest, O Lord, 
under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy 
glory." A bush or a tree with two or three 
other bushes or trees near by, and just enough 
sky to go with it — is it not enough? 

The average man is like the average woman 
in this regard except that he is less so. The 
fact seems to be that the average human being 
(like the average poet), at least for everyday 
purposes, does not want any more of the world 
around him than he can use, or than he can put 
somewhere. If there is so much more of the 
world than one can use, or than anyone else can 
use, what is the possible object of living where 
one cannot help being reminded of it? 

The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle 
persistent grudge against the infinite, shows 



Symbolism in Modern Art 89 

itself in the not uncommon prejudice against 
pine trees. There are a great many people who 
have a way of saying pleasant things about pine 
trees and who like to drive through them or look 
at them in the landscape or have them on other 
people's hills, but they would not plant a pine 
tree near their houses or live with pines singing 
over them and watching them, every day and 
night, for the world. The mood of the pine is 
such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious mood that 
there are very few persons, no matter how dull or 
unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are 
not as much affected by a single pine, standing 
in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole 
skyful of weather. If they are down on the in- 
finite — they do not want a whole treeful of it 
around on the premises. And the pine comes 
as near to being infinite as anything purely 
vegetable, in a world like this, could expect. 
It is the one tree of all others that profoundly 
suggests, every time the light falls upon it or 
the wind stirs through it, the things that man 
CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlight 
and its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the 
monument of the woods, to The Intangible, and 
The Invisible, to the spirituality of matter. Who 
shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit 
of the pine? And who, who has ever looked 
upon the pines — who has seen them climbing the 
hills in crowds, drinking at the sun — has not felt 



90 The Machines as Poets 

that however we may take to them personally 
they are the Chosen People among the trees ? To 
pass from the voice of them to the voice of 
the common leaves is to pass from the temple 
to the street. In the rest of the forest all the 
leaves seem to be full of one another's din — of 
rattle and chatter — heedless, happy chaos, but 
in the pines the voice of every pine-spill is as a 
chord in the voice of all the rest, and the whole 
solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the 
voice of the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, 
beautiful far-things that human spirits know 
had come from the paths of Space, and from 
the presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks 
over our heads. 

Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the 
pine in the imagination is not that it is more 
beautiful in itself than other trees, but that 
the beauty of the pine seems more symbolic 
than other beauty, and symbolic of more and of 
greater things. It is full of the sturdiness and 
strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the 
tree to see the sky with, and its voice is the voice 
of the horizons, the voice of the marriage of the 
heavens and the earth; and not only is there 
more of the sky in it, and more of the kingdom 
of the air and of the place of Sleep, but there is 
more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart 
of the earth. No other tree can be mutilated 
like the pine by the hand of man and still keep 



Symbolism in Modern Art 91 

a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty 
about it and about all the place where it stands. 
A whole row of them, with their left arms cut 
off for passing wires, standing severe and stately, 
their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help 
being beautiful. The beauty is symbolic and 
infinite. It cannot be taken away. If the en- 
tire street-side of a row of common, ordinary 
middle-class trees were cut away there would 
be nothing to do with the maimed and helpless 
things but to cut them down — remove their 
misery from all men's sight. To lop away the 
half of a pine is only to see how beautiful the 
other half is. The other half has the infinite in 
it. However little of a pine is left it suggests 
everything there is. It points to the universe 
and beckons to the Night and the Day. The in- 
finite still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the 
prophet of trees. In the sad lands it but grows 
more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit of the 
tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the in- 
finite — of everywhere — wherever its shadow falls. 
I have heard the sound of a hammer in the street 
and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine 
woods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud 
catches the great empty spaces of night out of 
heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers 
all sound into itself — echoes it along the infinite. 
The pine may be said to be the symbol of the 
beauty in machinery, because it is beautiful the 



92 The Machines as Poets 

way an electric light is beautiful, or an electric- 
lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty 
that belong to life: finite beauty, in that its 
beauty can be seen in itself, and infinite beauty 
in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of 
the beauty that cannot be seen, the beauty 
that dwells around it. 

What is going to be called the typical power 
of the colossal art, myriad-nationed, undreamed 
of men before, now gathering in our modern 
life, is its symbolic power, its power of standing 
for more than itself. 

Every great invention of modem mechanical 
art and modern fine art has held within it an 
extraordinary power of playing upon associa- 
tions, of playing upon the spirits and essences 
of things until the outer senses are all gathered 
up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were 
meant to be melted, into inner ones. What is 
wrought before the eyes of a man at last by a 
great modem picture is not the picture that 
fronts him on the wall, but a picture behind the 
picture, painted with the flame of the heart on 
the eternal part of him. It is the business of a 
great modem work of art to bring a man face 
to face with the greatness from which it came. 
Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite, — 
and a man and a woman. A picture with this 
feeling of the infinite painted in it — behind it — 
which produces this feeling of the infinite in 



Symbolism in Modern Art 93 

other men by playing upon the infinite in their 
own lives, is a typical modem masterpiece. 

The days when the infinite is not in our own 
lives we do not see it. If the infinite is in our 
own lives, and we do not like it there, we do 
not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, 
or in a Corliss engine — a picture of the face of 
All-Man, mastering the earth — silent — lifted to 
heaven. 



V 

THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS 

TT is not necessary, in order to connect a railway 
* train with the infinite, to see it steaming 
along a low sky and plunging into a huge white 
hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite 
as infinite flying through granite in Hoosac 
Mountain. Most people who do not think there 
is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with 
flying through granite as a trait of the infinite in 
a locomotive, and yet these same people, if a 
locomotive could be lifted bodily to where in- 
finity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky 
somewhere) — if they could watch one night after 
night plowing through planets — would want a 
poem written about it at once. 

A man who has a theory he does not see poetry 
in a locomotive, does not see it because theoretic- 
ally he does not connect it with infinite things ; 
the things that poetry is usually about. The 
idea that the infinite is not cooped up in heaven, 
94 



The Machines as Artists 95 

that it can be geared and run on a track (and be 
all the more infinite for not running off the 
track), does not occur to him. The first thing 
he does when he is told to look for the infinite 
in the world is to stop and think a moment, 
where he is, and then look for it somewhere 
else. 

It would seem to be the first idea of the in- 
finite, in being infinite, not to be anywhere else. 
It could not be anywhere else if it tried ; and if a 
locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in 
and out of the fiber of the earth and of the lives 
of men, the infinity and poetry in it are a mat- 
ter of course. I like to think that it is merely a 
matter of seeing a locomotive as it is, of see- 
ing it in enough of its actual relations as it is, 
to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the 
order, the energy, and the restfulness of the 
whole universe are pulsing there through its 
wheels. 

The times when we do not feel poetry in a 
locomotive are the times when we are not matter- 
of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough of its 
actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough 
is all that makes anything poetic. Everything 
in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as the sym- 
bol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded 
symbol of everything else in the universe — the 
summing up of everything else — another whis- 
per of God's. 



96 The Machines as Poets 

Have I not seen the great Sun Itself, from 
out of its huge heaven, packed in a seed and 
blown about on a wind ? I have seen the leaves 
of the trees drink all night from the stars, and 
when I have listened with my soul — thousands 
of years — I have heard The Night and The Day 
creeping softly through mountains. People 
called it geology. 

It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by 
going to the infinite, he is going to be infinite 
where he is. He is carving it on the hills, tun- 
neling it through the rocks of the earth, piling 
it up on the crust of it, with wdnds and waters 
and flame and steel he is writing it on all things — 
that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The 
whole planet is his signature. 

If what the modem man is trying to say in 
his modern age is his own infinity, it naturally 
follows that the only way a modern artist can 
be a great artist in a modem age is to say in that 
age that man is infinite, better than any one else 
is saying it. 

The best way to express this infinity of man is 
to seek out the things in the life of the man 
which are the symbols of his infinity — which 
suggest his infinity the most — and then play on 
those symbols and let those symbols play on 
him. In other words the poet's program is some- 
thing like this. The modern age means the 
infinity of man. Modern art means symbolism 



The Machines as Artists 97 

of man's infinity. The best symbol of the 
man's infinity the poet can find, in this world 
the man has made, is The Machine. 

At least it seems so to me. I was looking out 
of my study window down the long track in the 
meadow the other morning and saw a smoke- 
cloud floating its train out of sight. A high wind 
was driving, and in long wavering folds the cloud 
lay down around the train. It was like a great 
Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. 
For a moment it almost seemed that, instead 
of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud propel- 
ling a train — ^wing of a thousand tons. I have 
often before seen a broken fog towing a moun- 
tain, but never have I seen before, a train of cars 
with its engine, pulled by the steam escap- 
ing from its whistle. Of course the train out 
in my meadow, with its pillar of fire by night and 
of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing 
new; neither is the tower of steam when it 
stands still of a winter morning building pyr- 
amids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on 
the car-tops and scudding away in the light; 
but this mad and splendid Thing of Whiteness 
and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this 
ghost of a train — soul or look in the eyes of it, 
haunting it, gathering it all up, steel and thun- 
der, into itself, catching it away into heaven — 
was one of the most magical and stirring sights 
I have seen for a long time. It came to me like 



98 The Machines as Poets 

a kind of Zeit-geist or passing of the spirit of the 
age. 

When I looked again it was old 992 from the 
roundhouse escorting Number Eight to Spring- 
field. 



VI 

THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS 

IF we could go into Histor}'^ as we go into a 
theatre, take our seats quietly, ring up the 
vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then 
could watch it — all those far off queer happy 
people living before our eyes, two or three 
hours — living with their new inventions and 
their last wonders all about them, they would 
not seem to us, probably to know why 
they were happy. They would merely be 
living along with their new things from day to 
day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness. 
Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories 
for poems have to be arranged after we have 
had them. The fundamental appeal of machin- 
ery seems to be to every man's personal every- 
day instinct and experience. We have, most 
of the time, neither words nor theories for it. 

I do not think that our case must stand or 
fall with our theory. But there is something 
comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one 
99 

LOFC. 



lOo The Machines as Poets 

permission to let ones self go — makes it seem 
more respectable to enjoy things. So I suggest 
something — the one I have used when I felt I 
had to have one. I have partitioned it off by 
itself and it can be skipped. 

1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its 
Idea. 

2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in propor- 
tion as its form reveals the nature of its sub- 
stance, that is, conveys its idea. 

3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of im- 
measurable ideas consummately expressed. 

4. Machinery has poetry in it because the 
three immeasurable ideas expressed by machin- 
ery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry 
and of the imagination and the soul — ^infinity 
and the two forms of infinity, the liberty and 
the unity of man. 

5. These immeasurable ideas are consum- 
mately expressed by machinery because ma- 
chinery expresses them in the only way that 
immeasurable ideas can ever be expressed: (i) 
by literally doing the immeasurable things, (2) 
by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man 
who is in the mood of looking at it with his 
whole being, the machine is beautiful because it 
is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world 
contains of the infinity of his own life, and of 
the liberty and unity of all men's lives, which 
slowly, out of the passion of history is now 



Machines as Philosophers loi 

being wrought out before our eyes upon the 
face of the earth. 

6. It is only from the point of view of a 
nightingale or a sonnet that the aesthetic form 
of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be criti- 
cised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing 
with immeasurable ideas are finished forms the 
more symbolic and speechless they are ; the more 
they invoke the imagination and make it build 
out on God, and upon the Future, and upon 
Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and 
satisfying they are. 

7. The first great artist a modem or machine 
age can have, will be the man who brings out 
for it the ideas behind its machines. These 
ideas — the ones the machines are daily playing 
over and about the lives of all of us — might be 
stated roughly as follows: 

The idea of the incarnation-the god in the body of the man. 

The idea of liberty — the soul's rescue from others. 

The idea of unity — the soul's rescue from its mere self. 

The idea of the Spirit — the Unseen and Intangible. 

The idea of immortality. 

The cosmic idea of God. 

The practical idea of invoking great men. 

The religious idea of love and comradeship. 

And nearly every other idea that makes of 
itself a song or a prayer in the human spirit. 



PART FOUR 
IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES 



IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES 



THE IDEA OF INCARNATION 
" / sought myself through earth and fire and seas. 

And found it not — but many things beside; 
Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride, 
And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide. 

Then wandering upward through the solid earth 
With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth, 
I faced the dim. Forefather of my birth. 

And thus addressed Him, : " All of you that lie 

Safe in the dust or ride along the sky — 

Lo, these and these and these ! But where am. If" 

THE grasshopper may be called the poet of 
the insects. He has more hop for his 
size than any of the others. I am very fond of 
watching him — especially of watching those 
two enormous beams of his that loom up on 
either side of his body. They have always 
seemed to me one of the great marvels of me- 
chanics. By knowing how to use them, he 
105 



io6 Ideas behind the Machines 

jumps forty times his own length. A man who 
could contrive to walk as well as any ordinary 
grasshopper does (and without half trying) 
could make two hundred and fifty feet at a 
step. There is no denying, of course, that the 
man does it, after his fashion, but he has to 
have a trolley to do it with. The man seems 
to prefer, as a rule, to use things outside to get 
what he wants inside. He has a way of making 
everything outside him serve him as if he had it 
on his own body — uses a whole universe every 
day without the trouble of always having to 
carry it around with him. He gets his will out 
of the ground and even out of the air. He lays 
hold of the universe and makes arms and legs 
out of it. If he wants at any time, for any reason, 
more body than he was made with, he has his 
soul reach out over or around the planet a 
little farther and draw it in for him. 

The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not 
differ from the man in that he has a soul and 
body both, but his soul and body seem to be 
perfectly matched. He has his soul and body 
all on. It is probably the best (and the worst) 
that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if he 
has one, that it is in his legs — that he really 
has his wits about him. 

Looked at superficially, or from the point of 



The Idea of Incarnation 107 

view of the next hop, it can hardly be denied 
that the body the human soul has been fitted 
out with is a rather inferior affair. From the 
point of view of any respectable or ordinarily 
well-equipped animal the human body — the one 
accorded to the average human being in the 
great show of creation — almost looks sometimes 
as if God really must have made it as a kind of 
practical joke, in the presence of the other ani- 
mals, on the rest of us. It looks as if He had 
suddenly decided at the very moment he was 
in the middle of making a body for a man, that 
out of all the animals man should be immortal 
— and had let it go at that. With the excep- 
tion of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or 
camel and an extra fold or so in the hippo- 
potamus, we are easily the strangest, the most 
unexplained-looking shape on the face of the 
earth. It is exceedingly unlikely that we are 
beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to any 
one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do 
with our hands and feet, any animal on earth 
could tell us, are things we dd not do as well as 
men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as 
well as we did when we were bom. Our very 
babies are our superiors. 

The only defence we are able to make when 
we are arraigned before the bar , of creation, 
seems to be, that while some of the powers we 
have exhibited have been very obviously lost, 



io8 Ideas Behind the Machines 

we have gained some very fine new invisible 
ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all, 
— our nerves, for instance, — the mentalized 
condition of our organs. And then, of course, 
there is the superior quality of our gray matter. 
When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in 
this pathetic way from the judgment of the 
brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on 
looking at us in the mere ordinary, observing, 
scientific, realistic fashion, we hint at our mys- 
teriousness — a kind of mesh of mysticism there 
is in us. We tell them it cannot really be seen 
from the outside, how well our bodies work. 
We do not put it in so many words, but what 
we mean is, that we need to be cut up to be 
appreciated, or seen in the large, or in our more 
infinite relations. Our matter may not be very 
well arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter 
ourselves that there is a superior unseen spirit- 
ual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to 
appreciate us — more of the same sort, etc. In 
the meantime (no man can deny the way things 
look) here we all are, with our queer, pale, little 
stretched-out legs and arms and things, floimd- 
ering about on this earth, without even our 
clothes on, covering ourselves as best we can. 
And what could really be funnier than a human 
body living before The Great Sun under its 
frame of wood and glass, all winter and all 
summer . . , strange and bleached-looldng, 



The Idea of Incarnation 109 

like celery, grown almost always under cloth, 
kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it 
likes for itself, moving about or being moved 
about, the way it is, in thousands of queer, 
dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, 
we can well believe, as we go up and down in 
it is full of soft laughter at us. One cannot so 
much as go in swimming without feeling the 
fishes peeking aroimd the rocks, getting their 
fun out of us in some still, underworld sort of 
way. We cannot help — a great many of us — 
feeling, in a subtle way, strange and embar- 
rassed in the woods. Most of us, it is true, 
manage to keep up a look of being fairly at 
home on the planet by huddling up and Hving 
in cities. By dint of staying carefully away 
from the other animals, keeping pretty much 
by ourselves, and whistling a good deal and 
making a great deal of noise, called civilization, 
we keep each other in countenance after a 
fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal 
world, and when we stop to think of it and face 
the facts and see ourselves as the others see us, 
we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, 
rather Hke to, and have it done with. 

It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures 
now, as I go up and down the world, — looking 
upon the man's body, — the little ftmny one that 
he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul 
and looking upon the one that he really has. 



no Ideas Behind the Machines 

When one considers what a man actually does, 
where he really lives, one sees very plainly that 
all that he has been allowed is a mere suggestion 
or hint of a body, a sort of central nerve or 
ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of 
infinity, blown down on a star — held there by 
the grip, apparently, of Nothing — a human body 
is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There 
is something indescribably helpless and wistful 
and reaching out and incomplete about it — a 
body made to pray with, perhaps, one might 
say, but not for action. All that it really comes 
to or is for, apparently, is a kind of light there 
is in it. 

But the sea is its footpath. The light that 
is in it is the same Hght that reaches down to 
the central fires of the earth. It flames upon 
heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it 
is, when I look upon it, I have seen the animals 
slinking to their holes before it, and worship- 
ping, or following the Hght that is in it. The 
great waters and the great lights flock to it — 
this beckoning and a prayer for a body, which 
the man has. 

I go into the printing room of a great news- 
paper. In a single flash of black and white the 
press flings down the world for him — birth, 
death, disgrace, honor and war and farce and 
love and death, sea and hills, and the days on 
the other side of the world. Before the dawn 



The Idea of Incarnation m 

the papers are carried forth. They hasten on 
ghmmering trains out through the dark. Soon 
the newsboys shrill in the streets — China and 
the Philippines and Australia, and East and 
West they cry — the voices of the nations of the 
earth, and in my soul I worship the body of 
the man. Have I not seen two trains full of the 
will of the body of the man meet at full speed 
in the darkness of the night? I have watched 
them on the trembling ground — the flash of 
light, the crash of power, ninety miles an hour 
twenty inches apart, , . . thundering aisles 
of souls ... on into blackness, and in my 
soul I worship the body of the man. 

And when I go forth at night, feel the earth 
walking silently across heaven beneath my feet, 
I know that the heart-beat and the will of the 
man is in it — in all of it. With thousands of 
trains imder it, over it, around it, he thrills it 
through with his will. I no longer look, since 
I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon 
the countenance of the hills, nor feel the earth 
aroimd me growing softly or resting in the 
light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that 
reaches out around me, is the body of the man. 
One must look up to stars and beyond horizons 
to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, 
that shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of 
this body, all wireless telegraph and steel, or 
know the sound of its going ? Now, when I see 



112 Ideas Behind the Machines 

it, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. 
Like a low thtinder it reaches around the crust 
of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle body 
(oh, Signer Marconi!), swift as thought up over 
the hill of the sea, soft and stately as the walk- 
ing of the clouds in the upper air. 

Is there any one to-day so small as to know 
where he is? I am always coming suddenly 
upon my body, crying out with joy like a child 
in the dark, "And I am here, tool" 

Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, 
a man in it who shall feel Himself? 

And so it has come to pass, this vision I have 
seen with my own eyes — Man, my Brother, with 
his mean, absurd little unfinished body, going 
triumphant up and down the earth making 
limbs of Time and Space. Who is there who 
has not seen it, if only through the peephole of 
a dream — the whole earth lying still and strange 
in the hollow of his hand, the sea waiting upon 
him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the 
whole earth with a look, wrapped white and 
still in its ball of mist, the glint of the Atlantic 
on it, and in the blue place the vision of the 
ships. 

Between the seas and skies 

The Shuttle flies 

Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep. 

Thousand-sailed , 

Half in waking, half in sleep. 



The Idea of Incarnation 113 

Glistening calms and shouting gales 

Water-gold and green, 

And many a heavenly-minded blue 

It thrusts and shudders through, 

Past my starlight, 

Past the glow of suns I know, 

Weaving fates. 

Loves and hates 

In the Sea — 

The stately Shuttle 

To and fro, 

Mast by mast. 

Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons, 

Flights of Days and Nights 

Flies fast. 



It may be true, as the poets are telling us, 
that this fashion the modem man has, of reach- 
ing out with steel and vapor and smoke, and 
holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry 
in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for 
poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for my- 
self. I have seen the few poets of this modem 
world crowded into their comer of it (in West- 
minster Abbey), and I have seen also a great 
fotmdry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing 
the bodies and the souls of men aroimd the 
world, beating out the floors of cities, making 
the limbs of the great ships silently striding the 
sea, and rolling out the roads of continents. 

If this is not poetry, it is because it is too 
great a vision. And yet there are times I am 



114 Ideas Behind the Machines 

inclined to think when it brushes against us — 
against all of us. We feel Something there. 
More than once I have almost touched the edge 
of it. Then I have looked to see the man won- 
dering at it. But he puts up his hands to his 
eyes, or he is merely hammering on something. 
Then I wish that some one woiild be born for 
him, and write a book for him, a book that 
should come upon the man and fold him in like 
a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. 
He ought to have a book that shall be to him 
like a whole Age — the one he lives in, coming 
to him and leaning over him, whispering to him, 
"Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold 
thy hands and thy feet?" 

The trains like spirits flock to him. 

There are days when I can read a time-table. 
When I put it back in my pocket it sings. 

In the time-table I carry in my pocket I 
tmfold the earth. 

I have come to despise poets and dreams. 
Truths have made dreams pale and small. 
What is wanted now is some man who is literal 
enough to tell the truth. 



II 

THE IDEA OF SIZE 

SOMETIMES I have a haunting feeling that 
the other readers of Mount Tom (besides me) 
may not be so tremendously interested after all 
in machinery and interpretations of machinery. 
Perhaps they are merely being polite about the 
subject while up here with me on the mountain, 
not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking 
back. It is really no place for talking back, per- 
haps they think, on a mountain. But the trouble 
is, I get more interested than other people 
before I know it. Then suddenly it occurs to me 
to wonder if they are listening particularly and 
are not looking off at the scenery and the river 
and the hills and the meadow while I wander 
on about railroad trains and symbolism and the 
Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and elec- 
tricity and Schopenhauer and the other things, 
tracking out relations. It gets worse than other 
people's genealogies. 

But all I ask is, that when they come, as they 
are coming now, just over the page to some 
more of these machine ideas, or interpretations 
as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies 

"5 



ii6 Ideas Behind the Machines 

with engines, they will not drop the matter alto- 
gether. They may not feel as I do. It would 
be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, 
if I could be agreed with by everybody; but 
boring people is a serious matter — boring them 
all the time, I mean. It 's no more than fair, 
of course, that the subscribers to a magazine 
should run some of the risk — as well as the 
editor — but I do like to think that in these 
next few pages there are — spots, and that 
people will keep hopeful. 



Some people are very fond of looking up at 
the sky, taking it for a regular exercise, and 
thinking how small they are. It relieves them. 
I do not wish to deny that there is a certain 
luxury in it. But I must say that for all 
practical purposes of a mind — of having a mind — 
1 would be willing to throw over whole hours and 
days of feeling very small, any time, for a single 
minute of feeling big. The details are more 
interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of 
glittering generality. 

I do not think I am altogether unaware how 
I look from a star — at least I have spent days 
and nights practising with a star, looking down 



The Idea of Size 1 1 7 

from it on the thing I have agreed for the time 
being (whatever it is) to call myself, and I 
have discovered that the real luxury for me does 
not consist in feeling very small or even in 
feeling very large. The luxury for me is in 
having a regular reliable feeling, every day of 
my life, that I have been made on purpose — and 
very conveniently made, to be infinitely small 
or infinitely large as I like. I arrange it any 
time. I find myself saying one mintite, '"Are 
not the whole human race my house- serv ants ? 
Is not London my valet — always at my door to 
do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. 
It takes a world to make room for my body„ 
My soul is furnished with other worlds I cannot 
see." 

The next minute I find myself saying nothing. 
The whole star I am on is a bit of pale yellow 
down floating softly through space. What I 
really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling.. 
Whether I am small or large all space cannot 
help waiting upon me — now that I have taken 
iron and vapor and light and made hands for 
my hands, millions of them, and reached out 
with them, A little one shall become a thou- 
sand. I have abolished all size — even my own 
size does not exist. If all the work that is being 
done by the hands of my hands had literally to 
be done by men, there would not be standing 
room for them on the globe — comfortable 



ii8 Ideas Behind the Machines 

standing room. But even though, as it happens, 
much of the globe is not very good to stand on, 
and vast tracts of it, every year, are going to 
waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing 
we touch is near or far, or large or small , as we 
like. As long as a young woman can sit down 
by a loom which is as good as six hundred more 
just like her, and all in a few square feet — as 
long as we can do up the whole of one of Na- 
poleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or stable 
twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean 
steamer, it does not make very much difference 
what kind of a planet we are on, or how large or 
small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems 
as if it were all used up and things look cramped 
again (which they do once in so often) we 
have but to think of something, invent some- 
thing, and let it out a little. We move over into 
a new world in a minute. Columbus was mere 
bagatelle. We get continents every few days. 
Thousands of men are thinking of them — adding 
them on. Mere size is getting to be old-fashioned 
— as a way of arranging things. It has never 
been a very big earth — at best — the way God 
made it first. He made a single spider that 
could weave a rope out of her own body around 
it. It can be ticked all through, and all around, 
with the thoughts of a man. The universe 
has been put into a little telescope and the oceans 
into a little compass. Alice in Wonderland's 



The Idea of Size ng 

romantic and clever way with a pill is become the 
barest matter of fact. Looking at the world 
a single moment with a soul instead of a theodo- 
lite, no one who has ever been on it — before — • 
would know it. It's as if the world were a little 
wizened balloon that had been given us once 
and had been used so for thousands of years, 
and we had just lately discovered how to blow it. 



Ill 

THE IDEA OF LIBERTY 

SOME one told me one morning not so very 
long ago that the sun was getting a mile 
smaller across every ten years. It gave me a 
shut-in and helpless feeling. I found myself 
several times during that day looking at it 
anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to 
warm them. I knew in a vague fashion that 
it would last long enough for me. And a mile 
in ten years was not much. It did not take 
much figuring to see that I had not the slightest 
reason to be anxious. But my feelings were hurt. 
I felt as if something had hit the universe. I 
could not get myself — and I have not been 
able to get myself since — to look at it im- 
personally. I suppose every man lives in 
some theory of the universe, unconsciously, 
every day, as much as he lives in the sunlight. 
And he does not want it disturbed. I have 
always felt safe before. And, what was a nec- 
essary part of safety with me, I have felt that 



The Idea of Liberty 121 

history was safe — that there was going to be 
enough of it. 

I have been in the world a good pleasant 
while on the whole, tried it and got used to it — 
used to the weather on it and used to having 
my friends hate me and my enemies turn on 
me and love me, and the other imcertainties ; but 
all the time, when I looked up at the sun and 
saw it, or thought of it down under the world, 
I counted on it. I discovered that my soul 
had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum for 
all things. I helped God lift with it. It was 
obvious that it was going to be harder for both 
of us — a mere matter of time. I could not get 
myself used to the thought. Every fresh look 
I took at the sun peeling off mile after mile up 
there, as fast as I lived, flustered me — made 
my sky less useful to me, less convenient to 
rest in. I found myself trying slowly to see 
how this universe would look — 'what it would be 
like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody 
would have to be. It would be necessary to 
justify things for him. He would probably be 
too tired and cold to do it. So I tried. 

I had a good deal the same experience with 
Mount Pelee last summer. I resented being 
cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked. 

The fact that it leaked several thousand miles 
away, and had made a comparatively safe hole 
for it, out in the middle of the sea, only afforded 



122 Ideas behind the Machines 

momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper 
than that. It could not be remedied by a mere 
applying long distances to it. It was under- 
neath down in my soul. Time and Space could 
could not get at it. The feeling that I had been 
trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could 
not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been 
deliberately taken body and soul, without my 
knowing it and without my ever having been 
asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder 
to live, whether I wanted to or not — the sudden 
new appalling sense I had, that the ground 
underneath my feet was not really good and 
solid, that I was living every day of my life 
just over a roar of great fire, that I was 
being asked (and everybody else) to make 
history and build stone houses, and found in- 
stitutions and things on the bare outside — -the 
destroyed and ruined part of a ball that had 
been tossed out in space to burn itself up — the 
sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust 
I live on, or bit of caked ashes, was liable to 
break through suddenly at any time and pour 
down the center of the earth on one's head, 
did not add to the dignity, it seemed to me, or 
the self-respect of human life. ' ' You might as 
well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount 
Pelee in the face," I tried to say coldly and 
calmly to myself. "Here you are, set down 
helplessly among stars, on a great round blue 



The Idea of Liberty 123 

and green something all fire and wind inside. 
And it is all liable — this superficial crust or 
geological ice you are on — perfectly liable, at 
any time or any place after this, to let through 
suddenly and dump all the nations and all 
ancient and modern history, and you and Your 
Book, into this awful ceaseless abyss — of boiled 
mountains and stewed up continents that is 
seething beneath your feet. 
. It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an 
optimist on the edge of this earth as it is, to 
keep on believing in people and things on it, 
without having to believe besides that the earth 
is a huge round swindle just of itself, going round 
and round through all heaven, with all of us 
on it, laughing at us. 

I felt chilled through for a long time after 
Mount Pelee broke out. I went wistfully about 
sitting in sunny and windless places trying to 
get warmed all summer. And it was not all in 
my soul. It was not all subjective. I noticed 
that the thermometer was caught the same way. 
It was a plain case enough — 'it seemed to me — 
the heater I lived on had let through, spilled out 
and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground 
simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat 
in the sun and pictured the earth freezing itself 
up slowly and deliberately, on the outside. I 
had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the 
world was not coming as the ancients saw it, 



124 Ideas behind the Machines 

by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the fires 
going out. A mile ofiE the sun every ten years 
(this for the loss of outside heat) and volcanoes 
and things (for the inside heat), and gradually 
between being frozen under us, and frozen over 
us, both, both sides at once, the human race 
would face the situation. We would have to 
learn to live together. Any one could see that. 
The human race was going to be one long row, 
sometime — great nations of us and little ones 
all at last huddled up along the equator to keep 
warm. Just outside of this a little way, it 
would be perfectly empty star, all in a swirl of 
snowdrifts. 

I do not claim that it was very scientific to 
feel in this way, but I have always had, ever 
since I can remember, a moderate or decent 
human interest in the universe as a universe, 
and I had always felt as if the earth had made, 
for all practical purposes, a sort of contract with 
the human race, and when it acted like this — 
cooled itself off all of a sudden, in the middle of 
a hot summer, and all to show oS. sl comparatively 
unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an 
island far out at sea — I could not conceal from 
myself (in my present and usual capacity as a 
kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that 
there was something distinctly jarring about it 
and disrespectful. I felt as if we had been 
trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very 



The Idea of Liberty 125 

long — this injured feeling toward the universe 
in behalf of the man in it, but I could not help it 
at first. There grew an anger within me and 
then out of the anger a great delight. It seemed 
to me I saw my soul standing afar off down 
there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth. 

Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had 
always had. I was standing as I had always 
stood on an earth before, be it a bare or flowering 
one. I saw myself standing before all that was. 
Then I defied the heaven over my head and 
the ground under my feet not to keep me strong 
and glad before God. I saw that it mattered 
not to me, of an earth, how bare it was, or could 
be, or could be made to be ; if the soul of a man 
could be kept burning on it, victory and glad- 
ness would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking 
of the man. I took an inventory down in my 
being of all that the man was, of the might of 
the spirit that was in him. Would it be any- 
thing new to the man to be maltreated, a little, 
neglected — almost outwitted by a universe? 
Had he not already, thousands of times in the 
history of this planet, flung his spirit upon the 
cold, and upon empty space — and made homes 
out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He 
had entered the place of the mighty heat and 
made the coolness of shadow out of it. 

It was nothing new. The planet had always 
been a little queer. It was when it commenced. 



126 Ideas behind the Machines 

The only difference would seem to be that, in- 
stead of having the earth at first the way it is 
going to be by and by apparently — an earth 
with a little rim of humanity around it, great 
nations toeing the equator to live — everything 
was turned around. All the young nations 
might have been seen any day crowded around 
the ends or tips of the earth to keep from falling 
into the fire that was still at work on the middle 
of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to have 
things happen on it. Boys might have been 
seen almost any afternoon, in those early days, 
going out to the north pole and playing duck 
on the rock to keep from being too warm. 

It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste — the 
way a planet acts at any given time. Now it 
is one way and now another, and we do as we 
Hke. 

I do not pretend to say in so many words if 
the sun grew feeble, just what the man would 
do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he 
would make some kind of summer out of them. 
One cannot help feeling that if the sun went out, 
it would be because he wanted it to — had ar- 
ranged something, if nothing but a good bit of 
philosophy. It is not likely that the man has 
defied the heavens and the earth all these cen- 
turies for nothing. The things they have 
done against him have been the making of him. 
When he found this same sun we are talking 



The Idea of Liberty 127 

about, in the earliest days of all, was a sun 
that kept running away from him and left him 
in a great darkness half of every day he lived, 
he knew what to do. Every time that Heaven 
has done anything to him, he has had his answer 
ready. The man who finds himself on a planet 
that is only lighted part of the time, is merely 
reminded that he must think of something. He 
digs light out of the ground and glows up the 
world with her own sap. When he finds himself 
living on an earth that can only be said to be 
properly heated a small fraction of the year, 
he makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep 
him warm. Things like this are small to us. 
We put coal through a desire and take the breath 
out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook 
our food with poisons. We take water and burn 
it into air and we telegraph boilers, and flash 
mills around the earth on poles. We move 
vast machines with a little throb, like light. We 
put a street on a wire. Great crowds in the 
great cities — whole blocks of them — are handed 
along day and night like dots and dashes in 
telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a 
breath. We save a man up in his own whisper 
hundreds of years when he is dead. A human 
voice that reaches only a few yards makes 
thousands of miles of copper talk. Then we 
make the thousand miles talk without the 
copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat 



128 Ideas behind the Machines 

the air with a thought thousands of miles away 
— make it whisper for us to ships. One need 
not fear for a man Hke this — a man who has 
made all the earth a deed, an action of his own 
soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the 
waste of heaven and made words out of it. One 
cannot but believe that a man like this is a free 
man. Let what will happen to the sun that 
warms him or the star that seems just now his 
foothold in space. All shall be as his soul says 
when his soul determines what it shall say. 
Fire and wind and cold — when his soul speaks — • 
and Invisibility itself and Nothing are his 
servants. 

The vision of a little helpless human race 
huddled in the tropics saying its last prayers, 
holding up its face to a far-off neglected-looking 
universe, warming its hands at the stars — the 
vision of all the great peoples of the earth 
squeezed up into Esquimaux, in furs up to their 
eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep 
warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set 
of scientists gloats on giving us. One needs but 
to look for what the other set is saying. It has 
not time to be saying much, but what it prac- 
tically says is: "Let the sun wizen up if it 
wants to. There will be something. Somebody 
will think of something. Possibly we are out- 
growing suns. At all events to a real man any 
little accident or bruise to the planet he 's on 



The Idea of Liberty 129 

is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some 
new beautiful impossibility — if the truth were 
known — is just what we are looking for. 

A human race which makes its car wheels 
and napkins out of paper, its street pavements 
out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes, 
which draws food out of air, which winds up 
operas on spools, which has its way with oceans, 
and plays chess with the empty ether that is 
over the sea — which makes clouds speak with 
tongues, which lights railway trains with pin- 
wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping 
them, and heats its furnaces with smoke — it 
would be very strange if a race like this could 
not find some way at least of managing its own 
planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though 
it be) some way of warming it , or of melting off 
a place to live on. A corporation was formed 
down in New Jersey the other day to light a 
city by the tossing of the waves. We are 
always getting some new grasp — giving some 
new sudden almost humorous stretch to matter. 
We keep nature fairly smiling at herself. One 
can hardly tell, when one hears of half the 
new things nowadays — actual facts — whether to 
laugh or cry, or form a stock company or break 
out into singing. No one would dare to say that 
a thousand years from now we will not have 
found some other use for moonlight than for 
love affairs and to haul tides with. We will 



130 Ideas Behind the Machines 

be manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed 
starlight, and heating houses with it. It will 
be peddled about the streets like milk, from 
door to door in cases and bottles. 

First and last, whatever else may be said of us, 
we do as we like with a planet. Nothing it can 
do to us, nothing that can happen to it, out- 
wits us — at least more than a few hundred years 
at a time. The idea that we cannot even keep 
warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be 
more likely — almost any time now — than for 
some one to decide that we ought to have our 
continents warmed more, winters. It would 
not be much , as things are going, to remodel the 
floors of a few of our continents— put in registers 
and things, have the heat piped up from the 
center of the earth. The best way to get a 
faint idea of what science is going to be like 
the next few thousand years, is to pick out 
something that could not possibly be so and 
believe it. We manufacture ice in July by 
boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet as we 
want to — at least a few furnished continents — 
with hot things, we will do it with cold ones, or 
by rubbing icebergs together. If one wants a 
good simple working outfit for a prophet in 
science and mechanics, all one has to do is to 
think of things that are unexpected enough, and 
they will come to pass. A scientist out in the 
Northwest has just finished his plans for getting 



The Idea of Liberty 131 

hold of the other end of the force of gravity. 
The general idea is to build a sort of tower or 
flag-pole on the planet — something that reaches 
far enough out over the edge to get an underhold 
as it were — grip hold of the force of gravity 
where it works backwards. Of course, as any- 
one can see at a glance, when it is once built 
out with steel, the first forty miles or so (work- 
men using compressed air and tubular trolleys, 
etc.), everything on the tower would pull the 
other way and the pressure would gradually be 
relieved until the thing balanced itself. When 
completed it could be used to draw down elec- 
tricity from waste space (which has as much as 
everybody on this planet could ever want, and 
more). What a little earth like ours would 
develop into, with a connection like this — a 
sort of umbilical cord to the infinite — no one 
would care to try to say. It would at least be 
a kind of planet that would always be sure of 
anything it wanted. When we had used up all 
the raw material or live force in our own world 
we could draw on the others. At the very 
least we would have a sort of signal station to 
the planets in general that would be useful. 
They would know what we want, and if we 
could not get it from them they would tell us 
where we could. 

All this may be a little mixing perhaps. 
It is always difficult to tell the difference be- 



132 Ideas Behind the Machines 

tween the sublime and the ridiculous in talking 
of a being like man. It is what makes him 
sublime — that there is no telling about him — • 
that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going 
son of God and throws off a world every now 
and then, or puts one on, with quips and jests. 
When the laugh dies away his jokes are prophe- 
cies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, 
you and I, Gentle Reader, while we are here 
with him — while this dear gentle ground is still 
beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. 
Let us notice stars more. 

In the meantime it does seem to me that a 
comparatively simple affair like this one single 
planet, need not worry us much. 

I still keep seeing it — I cannot help it — I 
always keep seeing it — eternities at a time, 
warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same 
old green and white, with all its improvements 
on it, whatever the sun does. And above all I 
keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and 
of love and worship, being born and buried — the 
little-great man, running about and strutting, 
flying through space on it, all his interests and 
his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckon- 
ing to worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man 
does with the other worlds or with this one, 
I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand 
or deck in eternity, for praying and singing and 
living, it always was. Long after I am dead, 



The Idea of Liberty 133 

oh, dear little planet, least and furthest breath 
that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to 
you, rises around you, and looks back upon 
you and watches you down there in your 
round white cloud, rowing faithfully through 
space! 



IV 

THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 

IF I had never thought of it before, and some 
one were to come around to my study to- 
morrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, 
I am not at all sure that I would be attracted 
by it. The first thing that I should do, prob- 
ably, would be to argue a little — ask him what 
it was for. I might take some pains not to 
commit myself (one does not want to settle a 
million years in a few minutes), but I cannot 
help being conscious, on the inside of my own 
mind, at least, that the first thought on immor- 
tality that would come to me, would be that 
perhaps it might be overdoing things a little. 

I can speak only for myself. I am not un- 
aware that a great many men and women are 
talking to-day about immortality and writing 
about it. I know many people too, who, in a 
faithful, worried way seem to be lugging about 
with them, while they live, what they call a 
faith in immortality, I would not mean to say 
134 



The Idea of Immortality 135 

a word against immortality, if I were asked sud- 
denly and had never thought of it before. If by 
putting out my hand I could get some of it, for 
other people, — people that wanted it or thought 
they did — I would probably. They would be 
happier and easier to live with. I cotdd watch 
them enjoying the idea of how long they were 
going to last. There woiild be a certain social 
pleasure in it. But, speaking strictly for my- 
self, if I were asked suddenly and had never 
heard of it before, I would not have the slightest 
preference on the subject. It may be true, as 
some say, that a man is only half alive if he 
does not long to live forever, but while I have 
the best wishes and intentions with regard to 
my hope for immortality I cannot get inter- 
ested. I feel as if I were living forever now, 
this very moment, right here on the premises — ■ 
Universe, Earth, United States of America, 
Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachu- 
setts. I feel infinitely related every day and 
hour and minute of my life, to an infinite num- 
ber of things. As for joggling God's elbow or 
praying to Him or any such thing as that, under 
the circumstances, and begging Him to let me 
live forever, it always seems to me (I have done 
it sometimes when I was very tired) as if it 
were a way of denying Him to His face. How 
a man who is literally standing up to his soul's 
eyes, and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, 



136 Ideas Behind the Machines 

who can feel the eternal throbbing through the 
very pores of his body, can so far lose his sense 
of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as 
to put up a petition to God to live forever, I 
entirely fail to see. I always feel as if I had 
stopped living forever — to ask Him. 

I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car 
when all the world was asleep, and have been 
shot through still country fields in the great 
blackness. All things that were — it seemed to 
my soul, were snuffed out. It was as if all the 
earth had become a whir and a bit of light — had 
dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar 
through Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself 
I said, "Now I will try to realize Motion, I 
will see if I can know. I spread my soul about 
me. . . . Ties flying under my feet, black 
poles picked out with lights, flapping ghostlike 
past the windows. . . . Voices of wheels over 
and under. . . . The long, dreary waver of 
the something that sounds when the car stops 
(and which feels like taking gas) . . . the 
semi-confidential, semi -public talk of the pas- 
sengers, the sudden collision with silence, they 
come to, when the car halts — all these. Finally 
when I look up every one has slipped away. 
Then I find my soul spreading further and fur- 
ther. The great night, silent and splendid, 
builds itself over me. The night is the crowded 
time to travel — car almost to one's self, nothing 



The Idea of Immortality 137 

but a few whirls of light and a conductor for 
company — the long monotone of miles — miles — 
flying beside me and above and around and be- 
neath — all this shadowed world to belong to, to 
dwell in, to pick out with one's soul from Dark- 
ness. " Here am I," I said as the roar tightened 
once more, and gripped on its awful wire and 
glowed through the blackness. "Here I am in 
infinite space, I and my bit of glimmer. . . . 
Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, 
and stamp my feet on to know it is there, falls 
and plunges with me out through deserts of 
space, and stars I cannot see have their hand 
upon me and hold me." 

No one would deny that the idea of immor- 
tality is a well-meaning idea and pleasantly in- 
clined and intended to be appreciative of a God, 
but it does seem to me that it is one of the most 
absent-minded ways of appreciating Him that 
could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High 
Street. I have all the immortality I can use, 
without going through my own front gate. I 
have but to look out of a window. There is no 
denying that Mount Tom is convenient, and as 
a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or horse-block to 
the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, 
a mountain may be an advantage, perhaps, 
and make some difference; but I must confess 
that it seems to me that in all times and in all 
places a man's immortality is absolutely in his 



138 Ideas Behind the Machines 

own hands. His immortality consists in his 
being in an immortally related state of mind. 
His immortality is his sense of having infinite 
relations with all the time there is, and his in- 
finity consists in his having infinite relations 
with all the space there is. "Wherever, as a 
matter of form, a man may say he is living or 
staying, the universe is his real address. 

I have been at sea — lain with a board over 
me out in the wide night and looked at the in- 
finite through a port -hole. Over the edge of the 
swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and 
possessed them. Under my board in the night 
I have lain still with the whole earth and mas- 
tered it in my heart, shared it until I could not 
sleep with the joy of it — the great ship with all 
its souls throbbing a planet through me and 
chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, 
"Where art thou?" I looked down upon my- 
self as if I were a God looking down on myself 
and upon the others, and upon the ship and 
upon the waters. 

A thousand breaths we lie 

Shrouded limbs and faces 

Horizontal 

Packed in cases 

In our named and numbered places, 

Catalogued for sleep, 

Trembling through the Godlight 

Below, above, 

Deep to Deep, 



The Idea of Immortality 139 

How a church-going man in a world like this 
can possibly contrive to have time to cry out or 
worry on it, or to be troubled about another — 
how he can demand another, the way he does 
sometimes, as if it were the only thing left a 
God could do to straighten matters out for hav- 
ing put him on this one, and how he can call 
this religion — is a problem that leaves my mind 
like an exhausted receiver. It is a grave ques- 
tion whether any immortality they are likely to 
get in another world would ever really pay some 
people for the time they have wasted in this 
one, worrying about it. 

Does any science in the world suppose or dare 
to suppose that I am as unimportant in it as I 
look — or that I could be if I tried ? that I am a 
parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under 
a shimmering mist of worlds that do not serve 
me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am 
not living and that I will not and cannot live 
underneath a universe . . . with a little hori- 
zon or teacup of space set down over me. The 
whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It be- 
longs to me and I to it. I have said to the 
heavens that they shall hourly minister to me 
— to the uses of my spirit and the needs of my 
body. When I, or my spirit, would move a 
little I swing out on stars. In the watches of 
the night they reach under my eyelids and serve 
my sleep and wait on me with dreams, I know 



I40 Ideas Behind the Machines 

I am immortal because I know I am infinite. 
A man is at least as long as he is wide. There 
is no need to quibble with words. I care little 
enough whether I am supposed to say it is for- 
ever across my soul or everywhere across it. 
Whichever it is, I make it the other when I am 
ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infi- 
nitely related life, why should it matter whether 
he is eternal as he calls it or not, — takes his 
immortality sideways here, now, and in the 
terms of space or later with some kind of time- 
arrangement stretched out and petering along 
over a long, narrow row of years ? 

Thousands of things are happening that are 
mine — out, around, and through the great dark- 
ness — being bom and killed and ticked and 
printed while I sleep. When I have stilled my- 
self with sleep, do I not know that the lightning 
is waiting on me ? When I see a cloud of steam 
I say, "There is my omnipresence." My being 
is busy out in the universe having its way some- 
where. The days on the other side of the world 
are my days. I get what I want out of them 
without having to keep awake for them. In 
the middle of the night and without trying I lay 
my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever 
it may be, or whether I so much as look upon 
it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof for 
me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins. 



The Idea of Immortality 141 
II 

I have been reading lately a book on Immor- 
tality, the leading idea of which seems to be a 
sort of astral body for people — people who are 
worthy of it. The author does not believe after 
the old-fashioned method that we are going to 
the stars. He intimates (for all practical pur- 
poses) that we do not need to. The stars are 
coming to us, — are already being woven in us. 
The author does not say it in so many words, 
but the general idea seems to be that the more 
spiritual or subtle body we are going to have, 
is already started in us — if we live as we should 
— growing like a kind of lining for this one. 

I can only speak for one, but I find that when 
I am willing to take the time from reading books 
on immortality to enjoy a few infinite experi- 
ences, I am not apt to be troubled very much 
about another world. 

It is daily obvious to me that I belong and 
that I am living in an infinite and eternal world, 
inconceivably better planned and managed than 
one of mine would be, and the only logical thing 
that I can do, is to take it for granted that the 
next one is even better than this. If the main 
feature of the next world consists in there not 
being one, then so much the better. I would 
not have thought so. It seems a little abrupt 
at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail 



142 Ideas Behind the Machines 

and why not leave it to God to work it out ? 
He does n't have to neglect anything to do it — 
which is what we do — and He is going to do it 
anyway. 

I have refused to take time from my infinity 
now for a theory of a theory about some new 
kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly 
still. There is an infinite opening and shutting 
of doors for me, through all the heavens and the 
earth. I lie with my head in the deep grass. A 
square yard is forever across. I listen to a 
great city in the grass — millions of insects. 
Microscopes have threaded it for me. I know 
their city — all its mighty little highways. I 
possess it. And when I walk away I rebuild 
their city softly in my heart. Winds, tides, and 
vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may 
possess them. I reach down to the silent metals 
under my feet that millions of ages have worked 
on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel 
the stm and the lives of nations flowing around 
to me, from under the sea. Who can shut me 
out from anybody's sunrise? 

"Oh, tenderly the haughty day 
Fills his blue urn with fire; 
One morn is in the mighty heaven 
And one in my desire." 

I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers 
on earth, I can telegraph for them. I go to 



The Idea of Immortality 143 

the weather I want. The sky — to me — is no 
longer a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, 
conducting a big foolish cloud-business, sending 
down decrees of weather on helpless cities. 
With a whistle and a roar I defy it — move any 
strip of it out from over me — for any other 
strip. I order the time of year. It is my sky. 
I bend it a little — ^just a little. The sky no 
longer has a monopoly of wonder. With the 
hands of my hands, my brother and I have 
made an earth that can answer a sky back, that 
can commune with a sky. The soul at last 
guesses at its real self. It reaches out and 
dares. Men go about singing with telescopes. 
I do not always need to lift my hands to a sky 
and pray to it now. I am related to it. With 
the hands of my hands I work with it. I say 
"I and the sky." I say "I and the Earth." 
We are immortal because we are infinite. We 
have reached over with the hands of our hands. 
They are praying a stupendous prayer — a kind 
of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped 
— vaguely — wonderfully out in the Dark. No 
longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one 
of his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sub- 
lime itself is a neighborly thought. God's 
machine — up — There — and the machines of the 
man have signaled each other. 



V 

THE IDEA OF GOD 

MY Study (not the place where I get my 
knowledge but the place where I put it 
together) is a great meadow — ten square splendid 
level miles of it — as fenceless and as open as a sky 
— merely two mountains to stand guard. If 

H the scientist who lives nearest to me 

(that is; nearest to my mind,) were to come 
down to me to-morrow morning, down in my 
meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and 
railways humming gently around the edges 
and tell me that he had found a God, I would 
not believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in 
which Bottle? " I have groped for one all these 
years. Ever since I was a child I have been 
groping for a God. I thought one had to. I have 
turned over the pages of ancient books and 
hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the 
events of the great world and looked on the 
under sides of leaves and guessed on the other 
144 



The Idea of God 145 

sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could 
make out to find a God in that way. I wonder 
if anyone can. 

I know it is not the right spirit to have, but 
I must confess that when the scientist (the 
smaller sort of scientist around the corner in my 
mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts 
and things, pottering with his argument of design, 
comes down to me in my meadow and reminds 
me that he has been looking for a God and tells 
me cautiously and with all his kind, conscien- 
tious hems and haws that he has found Him, I 
wonder if he has. 

The very necessity a man is under of seeking 
a God at all, in a world alive all over like this, 
of feeling obliged to go on a long journey to 
search one out makes one doubt if the kind of 
God he would find would be worth while. I 
have never caught a man yet who has found 
his God in this way, enjoying Him or getting 
anyone else to. 

It does seem to me that the idea of a God is 
an absolutely plain, rudimentary, fundamental, 
universal human instinct, that the very essence 
of finding a God consists in His not having to 
be looked for, in giving one's self up to one's plain 
every-day infinite experiences. I suppose if 
it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel 
with the scientist is not that he is material, but 
that he is not material enough, — he does not 



146 Ideas Behind the Machines 

conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot 
believe for instance that any man on earth to 
whom the great spectacle of matter going on 
every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed 
thing — any man who is willing to turn aside 
from this spectacle — this spectacle as a whole — 
and who looks for a God like a chemist in a 
bottle for instance — a bottle which he places 
absolutely by itself, would be able to find one if 
he tried. It seems to me that it is by letting 
one's self have one's infinite — one's infinitely 
related experiences, and not by cutting them off 
that one comes to know a God. To find a God 
who is everywhere one must at least spend a 
part of one's time in being everywhere one's self 
• — in relating one's knowledge to all knowledge. 
There are various undergirding arguments 
and reasons, but the only way that I really 
know there is an infinite God is because I am 
infinite — in a small way — myself. Even the 
matter that has come into the world connected 
with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. 
If my soul, like some dim pale light left burning 
within me, were merely to creep to the boundaries 
of its own body, it would know there was a 
God. The very flesh I live with every day is 
infinite flesh. From the furthest rumors of 
men and women, the furthest edge of time and 
space my soul has gathered dust to itself. 
I carry a temple about with me. If I could 



The Idea of God 147 

do no better, and if there were need, I am my 
own cathedral. I worship when I breathe. 
I bow down before the tick of my pulse. I chant 
to the palm of my hand. The Unes in the tips of 
my fingers could not be duplicated in a million 
years. Shall any man ask me to prove there 
are miracles or to put my finger on God ? or to go 
out into some great breath of emptiness or argu- 
ment to be sure there is a God? I am infinite. 
Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the God 
within me. Has He not kindled the fire in 
my bones and out of the burning dust warmed 
me before the stars — made a hearth for my 
soul before them? I am at home with them. 
I sit daily before worlds as at my own fireside. 
I suppose there is something intolerant and 
impatient and a little heartless about an optimist 
— especially the kind of optimism that is based 
upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the 
structure of the world. There is such a thing, 
I suppose, with some of us, as having a kind of 
devilish pride in faith, as one would say to 
ordinary mortals and creepers and considerers 
and arguers "Oh now just see me believe!" 
We are like boys taking turns jumping in the 
Great Vacant Lot, seeing which can believe the 
furthest. We need to be reminded that a man 
cannot simply bring a little brag to God, about 
His world, and make a religion out of it. I do 
not doubt in the least, as a matter of theory, 



148 Ideas Behind the Machines 

that I have the wrong spirit — sometimes — to- 
ward the scientific man who lives around the 
corner of my mind. It seems to me he is al- 
ways suggesting important-looking unimportant 
things. I have days of sympathizing with him, 
of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack up 
upon my shoulders and strapping it there. 
But before I know it I 'm off. I throw it away 
or melt it down into a tablet or something — 
put it in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God. 

And the worst of it is, I think He intended 
me to. I think He intended me to know and to 
keep knowing daily what He has done for me 
and is doing now, out in the universe, and 
what He has made me to do. I also am a God. 
From the first time I saw the sun I have been 
one daily. I have performed daily all the 
homelier miracles and all the common functions 
of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into 
my being. Out of the air of heaven I have 
made flesh. I have taken earth from the earth 
and burned it within me and made it into prayers 
and into songs. I have said to my soul "To 
eat is to sing." I worship all over. I am my 
own sacrament. I lay before God nights of 
sl6ep, and the delight and wonder of the flesh I 
render back to Him again, daily, as an offering 
in His sight. 

And what is true of my literal body — of the 



The Idea of God 149 

joy of my hands and my feet, is still more true 
of the hands of my hands. 

When I wake in the night and send forth my 
thought upon the darkness, track out my own 
infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky 
reaching around me, all telegraphed through with 
thought, and floored with steel, I may have 
to grope for a God a httle (I do sometimes), 
but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the 
door of heaven if there is a heaven or needs 
to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory 
of the other worlds, has not science itself told 
me that they are a part of me and I a part of 
them? Nothing is that would not be different 
without something else. My thoughts are 
ticking through the clouds, and the great sun 
itself is creeping through me daily down in my 
bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a 
hundred seas. I turn over in my sleep at mid- 
night and lay my hand on the noon. And 
when I have slept and walk forth in the morning, 
the stars flow in my veins. Why should a man 
dare to whine.? "Whine not at me!" I have 
said to man my brother. If you cannot sing 
to me do not interrupt me. 

Let him sing to me 

Who sees the watching of the stars above the day, 

Who hears the singing of the sunrise 

On its way 



150 Ideas Behind the Machines 

Through all the night. 

Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms, 

Whose soul has roamed 

Infinite-homed 

Through tents of Space, 

His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms 

All wonder. 

Let him sing to me 

Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover 

Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds 

The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife, 

The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds. 

Of His Own Life. 



VI 

THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE 

^A^ ODE TO THE UNSEEN 

Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space, 
Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words 
In the music-haunted houses of the birds, 
Singers with the thrushes and pewees 
In the glimmer-lighted roofs 
Of the trees — 
Unhand my soul! 
Buds with singing in their hearts, 
Birds with blooms upon their wings, 
All the wandering whispers of delight. 
The near familiar things ; 
Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies, 
Sounds of going in the grain 
Shall not bind me to thy singing 
When the sky with God is ringing 
For the Joy of the Rain. 
Sea and star and hill and thunder. 
Dawn and sunset, noon and night, 
All the vast processional of the wonder 
Where the worlds are. 
Where my soul is. 
Where the shining tracks are 
151 



152 Ideas Behind the Machines 

For the spirit's flight — 

Lift thine eyes to these 

From the haunts of dewdrops, 

Hollows of the flowers, 

Caves of bees 

That sing like thee, 

Only in their bowers; 

From the stately growing cities 

Of the little blowing leaves, 

To the infinite windless eaves 

Of the stars; 

From the dainty music of the ground, 

The dim innumerable sound 

Of the Mighty Sun 

Creeping in the grass, 

Softest stir of His feet 

(Where they go 

Far and slow 

On their immemorial beat 

Of buds and seeds 

And all the gentle and holy needs 

Of flowers). 

To the old eternal round 

Of the Going of His Might, 

Above the confines of the dark. 

Odors and winds and showers. 

Day and night. 

Above the dream of death and birth 

Flickering East and West, 

Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth- 



The Unseen and Intangible 1 53 

Where He wheels 

And soars 

And plays 

In illimitable light, 

Sends the singing stars upon their ways 

And on each and every world 

When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep 

Is furled — 

Pours the Days. 

* * * 
The first time I gazed in the great town upon 
a solid mile of electric cars^threaded with 
Nothing — mesmerism hauling a whole' city 
home to supper, it seemed to me as if the 
central power of all things, The Thing that 
floats and breathes through the universe, must 
have been found by someone — gathered up 
from between stars, and turned on — poured 
down gently on the planet — falling on a thousand 
wheels, and run on the tops of cars — the secret 
thrill that softly and out in the darkness and 
through all ages had done all things. I felt 
as if I had seen the infinite in some near familiar, 
humdrum place. I walked on in a dazed 
fashion. I do not suppose I could really have 
been more surprised if I had met a star walking 
in the street. 

In my deepest dream 
I heard the Song 
Running in my sleep 



154 Ideas Behind the Machines 

Through the lowest caves of Being 

Down below 

Where no sound is, sun is, 

Hearing, seeing 

That men know. 

There was something about it, about that 
sense of the mile of cars moving, that made 
it all seem very old. 

An Ode to the Lightning. 

Before the first new dust of dream God took 

For making man and hope and love and graves 

Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods 

Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow 

Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints, 

The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague 

To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept 

From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuflE 

That wove the worlds, 

Before the Hand had stirred that touched them, 

While still, hinged on nothing, 

Dim and shapeless Things 

And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings 

Floated and waited. 

Before the winds had breathed the breath of life 

Or blown from wastes of Space 

To Earth's creating place. 

The souls of seeds 

And ghosts of old dead stars. 



Idea of the Unseen and Intangible 1 55 

The Lightning Spirit willed 

Their feet with wonder should be thrilled. 

— Primal fire of all desire 

That leaps from men to men, 

Brother of Suns 

And all the Glorious Ones 

That circle skies, 

He flashed to these 

The night that brought the birth, 

The vision of the place 

And raised his awful face 

To all their glittering crowds, 

And cried from where It lay 

— A tiny ball of fire and clay 

In swaddling clothes of clouds, 

"Behold the Earth!" 



Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer 

Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains! 

Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their 

misty caves. 
Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors 

twixt heaven 
And heaven and Heaven's heaven. Oh thou 

whose play 



1 56 Ideas Behind the Machines 

Men make to do their work (Why do their work f) 
— And call from holidays of space, sojourns 
Of suns and moons, and lock to earth 
(Why lock to earth f) 

That the Dead Face may flash across the seas 
The cry of the new-bom babe be heard around 
A world. Ah me! and the click of lust 
And the madness and the gladness and the ache 
Of Dust, Dust! 



AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES. 

THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE 
ATLANTIC CABLE 

The mortal wires of the heart of the earth 

I sing, melted and fused by men, 

That the immortal fires of their souls should fling 

To eaves of heaven and caves of sea, 

And God Himself, and farthest hiUs and dimmest 

bounds of sense 
The flame of the Creature's ken, 
The flame of the glow of the face of God 
Upon the face of men. 

Wind-singing wires 
Along their thousand airy aisles. 
Feet of birds and songs of leaves, 
Glimmer of stars and dewy eves. 
Sea-singing wires 

Along their thousand slimy miles. 
Shadowy deeps. 
Unsunned steeps, 
Beating in their awful caves 
157 



158 Ideas Behind the Machines 

To mouthing fish and bones 

And weeds unfurled 

Deserts of waves 

The heart-beat of this upper world. 

Infinite blue, infinite green, 

Infinite glory of the ear 

Ticking its passions through 

Infinite fear. 

Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks 

The forever untrodden decks 

Of Death, 

Ever the seething wires 

On the floors 

Of the world. 

Below the last 

Locked fast 

Water-darkened doors 

Of the sun. 

Lighting the awful signal hres 

Of our speechless vast desires 

On the mountains and the hills 

Of the sea 

Till the sandy-buried heights 

And the sullen sunken vales 

And fire-defying barrens of the deep 

The hearth of souls shall be 

Beacons of Thought, 

And from the lurk of the shark 

To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark 

And where the farthest cloud-sail fills 



An Ode to the Wireless 159 

Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the 

hoping 
The might and mad delight, 
The hell-and-heaven groping 
Of our little human wills. 



AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS 

THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS 

IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH WOULD 

NOT WORK 

Roofed in with fears, 

Beneath its little strip of sky 

That is blown about 

In and out 

Across my wavering strip of years — 

Who am I 

Whose singing scarce doth reach 

The cloud-climbed hills, 

To take upon my lips the speech 

Of those whose voices Heaven fills 

With splendor? 

And yet — 

I cannot quite forget 

That in the underdawn of dreams 

I have felt the faint surmise 

Shining through the starry deep of my sleep 

That I with God went singing once 

Up and down with suns and storms 

Through the phantom-pillared forms 

And stately-silent naves 

1 60 



An Ode to the Wireless i6i 

And thunder-dreaming caves 
Of Heaven. 

Great Spirit — Thou who in my being's burning mesh 
Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and 

through the flesh, 
Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust 
Hast thrust 

Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights, 
Where are the deeds that needs must be, 
The dreams, the high delights, 
That I once more may hear my voice 
From cloudy door to door rejoice — 
May stretch the boundaries of love 
Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears 
To the faint-remembered glory of those years — • 
May lift my soul 
And reach this Heaven of thine 
With mine? 
Where are the gleams? 
Thou shalt tell me, 
Shalt compel me. 
The sometime glory shall return 
I know. 

The day shall be 
When by wondering I shall learn 
With vapor-fingers to discern 
The music-hidden keys of skies — 
Shall touch Uke thee 
Until they answer me 
The chords of the silent air 
And strike the wild and slumber-music out 
Dreaming there. 

Above the hills of singing that I know 
On the trackless, soundless path 
That wonder hath 



i62 Ideas Behind the Machines 

I shall go, 

Beyond the street-cry of the poet, 

The hurdy-gurdy singing 

Of the throngs, 

To the Throne of Silence, 

Where the Doors 

That guard the farthest faintest shores 

Of Day 

Swing their bars, 

And shut the songs of heaven in 

From all our dreaming-doing din, 

Behind the stars. 

There, at last, 

The climbing and the singing passed, 

And the cry, 

My hushed and listening soul shall lie 

At the feet of the place 

Where the Singer sings 

Who Hides His Face. 



VII 

THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN 

" / had a vision under a green hedge 

A hedge of hips and haws — Men yet shall hear 
Archangels rolling over the high mountains 
Old Satan's empty skull." 

As it looks from Mount Tom, casting a general 
glance around, the Earth has about been put 
into shape, now, to do things. 

The Earth has never been seen before looking 
so trim and convenient — so ready for action — as 
it is now. Steamships and looms and printing 
presses and railways have been supplied, wireless 
telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged 
throughout, and we have put in speaking tubes 
on nearly all the continents, and it looks — as 
seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet 
were just being finished up, now, for a Great 
Author, 

It is true that art and literature do not have, 
at first glance, a prosperous look in a machine 
163 



1 64 Ideas Behind the Machines 

age, but probably the real trouble the modem 
world is having with its authors is not because 
it is a world full of materialism and machinery, 
but because its authors are the wrong size. 

The modem world as it booms along recog- 
nizes this, in its practical way, and instead of 
stopping to speak to its little authors, to its 
poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and 
encouraging them, it is quietly and sensibly 
(as it seems to some of us) going on with its 
machines and things making preparations for 
bigger ones. 

I have thought the great authors in every 
age were made by the greatness of the listening 
to them. The greatest of all, I notice, have felt 
listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who 
have sometimes been called greatest) have felt 
listened to, most of them, one finds, by nothing 
less than nations. The man Jesus gathers 
kingdoms about Him in His talk, like an infant 
class. It was the way He felt. Almost any one 
who could have felt himself listened to in this 
daring way that Jesus did would have managed 
to say something. He could hardly have missed, 
one would think, letting fall one or two great 
ideas at least — ideas that nations would be 
born for. 

It ought not to be altogether without meaning 
to a modem man that the great prophets and 
interpreters have talked as a rule to whole 



The Idea of Great Men 165 

nations and that they have talked to them 
generally, too, for the glory of the whole earth. 
They could not get their souls geared smaller 
than a whole earth. Shakspeare feels the gene- 
rations stretching away like galleries around 
him listening — when he makes love. It was no 
particular heroism or patience in the man 
Columbus that made him sail across an ocean 
and discover a continent. He had the girth 
of an earth in him and had to do something 
with it. He could not have helped it. He 
discovered America because he felt crowded. 

One would think from the way some people 
have of talking or writing of immortality 
that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter 
of historic fact it has almost always been some 
mere great man's helplessness. When people 
have to be created and born on purpose, gener- 
ation after generation of them, to listen to a 
man, two or three thousand years of them some- 
times, on this planet, it is because the man 
himself when he spoke felt the need of them — 
and mentioned it. It is the man who is in 
the habit of addressing his remarks to a few 
continents and to several centuries who gets 
them. 

I would not dare to say just how or when our 
next great author on this earth is going to happen 
to us, but I shall begin to Hsten hard and look 
expectant the first time I hear of a man who 



i66 Ideas Behind the Machines 

gets up on his feet somewhere in it and who 
speaks as if the whole earth were Hstening to 
him. If ever there was an earth that is getting 
ready to Hsten, and to Hsten all over, it is this 
one. And the first great man who speaks in it 
is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world 
which has been allowed about a million years 
now, to get to the point where it could be said 
to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. 
And I cannot believe that a world which for 
the first time in its history has at last the con- 
veniences for listening all over, if it wants to, 
is not going to produce at the same time a man 
who shall have something to say to it — a man 
that shall be worthy of the first single full 
audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been 
thought of. It would seem as if, to say the 
least, such an audience as this, .gathering half 
in light and half in darkness around a star, 
would celebrate by having a man to match. 
It would not be necessary for him to fall back, 
either, one would think, upon anything that 
has ever been said or thought of before. Already 
even in the sight and sounds of this present 
world has the verse of scripture about the next 
come true — "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." 
It is not conceivable that there shall not be 
something said unspeakably and incredibly 
great to the first full house the planet has 
afforded. 



The Idea of Great Men 167 

I have gone to the place of books. I have 
seen before this all the peoples flocking past 
me under the earth with their little comer- 
saviors — each with his own little disc of worship 
all to himself on the planet — partitioned away 
from the rest for thousands of years. But now 
the whole face of the earth is changed. No 
longer can great men and great events be aimed 
at it and glanced off on it — into single nations. 
Great men, when they come now, can generally 
have a world at their feet. It is not possible 
that we shall not have them. The whole earth 
is the wager that we are going to have them. 
The bids are out — great statesmen, great actors, 
great financiers, great authors — even millionaires 
will gradually grow great. It cannot be helped. 
And it will be strange if someone* cannot 
think of something to say, with the first full house 
this planet has afforded. 

Even as it is now, let any man with a great 
girth of love in him but speak once — but speak 
one single round-the-world delight and nations 
sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is 
dying with pneumonia seven seas listen to his 
breathing. The nations are in galleries on the 
stage of the earth now, one listening above 
the other to the same play following around the 
sunrise. Every one is affected by it — a kind of 
soul-suction — a great pulling from the world. 
People who do not want to write at all feel it — 



i68 Ideas Behind the Machines 

a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction appar- 
ently — to a pen. The whole planet kindles 
every man's solitude. Continents are bellows 
for the glow in him if there is any. The wire- 
less telegraph beckons ideas around the world. 
"How does a planet applaud?" dreams the young 
author. "With a faint flush of light?" One 
would like to be liked by it — speak one's little 
piece to it. When one was through, one could 
hear the soft hurrah through Space. 

I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I 
ever could have thought or had times of thinking 
it was a little or a lonely world to write in — to 
flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what 
a world it was that came to men once and of 
the world that waits around me — around all of 
us now — I do like to mention it. 

When many years ago, as a small boy, I was 
allowed for the first time to open the little inside 
door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel 
steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the 
sea, I did not know why it was that I could 
not be called away from it, or why I stood and 
watched hour after hour unconscious before 
it — the thunder and the foam piling up upon 
my being. I have guessed now. I watch the 
drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were 
tracking out at last the last secret of loneliness. 
I face Time and Space with it. I know I 
have but to do a true deed and I am crov/ded 
round — to help me do it. I know I have but 



The Idea of Great Men 169 

to think a true thought, but to be true and 
deep enough with a book — feel a v/orldful for 
it, put a worldful in it — and the \/hole planet 
will look over my shoulder while I write. Thou- 
sands of printing presses under a thousand skies 
I hear truth working softly, saying over and 
over, and around and around the earth, the 
word that was given to me to say. 

Can any one believe that this strange new, 
deep, beautiful, clairvoyant feeling a man has 
nowadays every day, every hour, for the other 
side of a star, is not going to make arts and men 
and words and actions great in the world? 

Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watch- 
ing the first great gathering-in of a world to 
listen and to live. The continents are unani- 
mous. There has never been a quorum before. 
They are getting together at last for the first 
world-sized man, for the first world-sized word- 
They are listening him into life. It is really 
getting to be a planet now, a whole completed 
articulated, furnished, lived - through, loved- 
through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One 
sees the sign on it 

TO LET 

TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT. 



VIII 

THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP 

" Ever there comes an onward phrase to tne 
Of some transcendent m,usic I have heard ; 
No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered. 
No truinpet crash of blood-sick victory. 
But a glad strain of some still symphony 
That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred." 

HAVE you ever walked out over the hill in your 
city at night. Gentle Reader — your own 
city — felt the soul of it lying about you — lying 
there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? 
Have you never felt as you stood there that j^ou 
had some right to it, some right way down in 
your being — that all this haze of light and 
darkness, all the people in it, somehow really 
belonged to you? We do not exactly let our 
souls say it — at least out loud — ^but there 
are times when I have been out in the street 
with The Others, when I have heard them — 
heard our souls, that is — all softly trooping 
through us, saying it to ourselves. "0 to 
know — to be utterly known one moment; to 
170 



Love and Comradeship 171 

have, if only for one second, twenty thousand 
souls for a home ; to be gathered around by a city, 
to be sought out and haunted by some one great 
all-love, once, streets and silent houses of it! " 

I go up and down the pavements reaching 
out into the days and nights of the men and 
the women. Perhaps you have seen me, 
Gentle Reader, in The Great Street, in the long 
slow shuffle with the others? And I have said 
to you though I did not know it: " Did you not 
call to me? Did you hear anything? I think 
it was I calling to you. " 

I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept 
the land with my soul. I have gone about and 
looked upon the face of the earth. I have 
demanded of smoking villages sweeping past 
and of the mountains and of the plains and of 
the middle of the sea: "Where are those that 
belong to me? Will I ever travel near enough, 
far enough? I have gone up and down the 
world — seen the countless men and women in 
it, standing on either side of their Abyss of 
Circumstance, beckoning and reaching out. 
I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, 
or old, casting their bread upon the waters, 
graspmg at sunsets or afterglows, putting their 
souls Hke letters in bottles. Some of them seem 
to be flickering their lives out like Marconi mes- 
sages into a sort of infinite, swallowing human 
space. 



1/2 Ideas Behind the Machines 

Always this same wild aimless sea of living. 
There does not seem to be a geography for love. 
My soul answered me : "Did you expect a 
world to be indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. 
Blossoms and cyclones and sunshine and you 
and I — all blundering along together." "Let 
every seed swell for itself," the Universe has 
said, in its first fine careless rapture. God is 
merely having a good time. Why should I 
go up and down a universe crying through it, 
"Where are those that belong to me?" I have 
looked at the stars swung out at me and they 
have not answered, and now when I look at 
the men, I have seemed to see them, every 
man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands 
before him, hinged on emptiness. "You are 
alone," the heart hath said. "Get up and be 
your own brother. The world is a great WHO 
CARES?" 

But when, in the middle of deep, helpless 
sleep, tossed on the wide waters, I wake in a 
ship, feel it trembling all through out there 
with my brother's care for me, I know that 
this is not true. "Around sunsets, out through 
the great dark," I find myself saying, "he has 
reached over and held me. Out here on this 
high hill of water, under this low, touching 
sky, I sleep. " 

Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake 
silently, and feel gathered around. I wonder 



Love and Comradeship 173 

if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the 
button by my pillow. I listen to great cities 
tending me. I have found all the earth paved, 
or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with 
my brother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide 
from love. He has hired oceans to do my 
errands. He has made the whole human race 
my house-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer 
joy, thinking of the strange peoples where the 
morning is, running to and fro for me, down 
under the dark. Next me, the great quiet 
throb of the engine — between me and infinite 
space — beating comfortably. I cannot help 
answering to it — this soft and mighty reaching 
out where I lie. 

My thoughts follow along the great twin 
shafts my brother holds me with. I wonder 
about them. I wish to do and share with them. 

Were I a spirit I would go 

Where the murmuring axles of the screws 

Along their whirling aisles 

Break through the hold, 

Where they lift the awful shining thews 

Of Thought, 

Of Trade, 

And strike the Sea 

Till the scar of London lies 

Miles and miles upon its breast 

Out in the West. 

As I lie and look out of my port-hole and 



1 74 Ideas Behind the Machines 

watch the starHght stepping along the sea I 
let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship 
I am in — a little human beckoning between two 
deserts. Out through my port -hole I seem to 
see other ships, ghosts of great cities — an ocean 
of them, creeping through their still huge picture 
of the night, with their low hoarse whistles 
meeting one another, whispering to one another 
under the stars. 

"And they are all mine," I say, "hastening 
gently." 

I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole 
being float out upon the thought of it. The 
bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived 
a great life. It is as if I had been allowed to be 
a great man a minute. I feel rested down 
through to before I was bom. The very stars, 
after it, seem rested over my head. I have 
gathered my universe about me. It is as if 
I had lain all still in my soul and some 
beautiful eternal sleep — a minute of it — had 
come to me and visited me. All men are my 
brothers. Is not the world filled with hastening 
to me ? What is there my brother has not done 
for me? From the uttermost parts of the 
morning, all things that are flow fresh and 
beautiful upon my flesh. He has laid my will 
on the heavens. His machines are like the 
tides that do not stop. They are a part of the 
vast antennae of the earth. They have grown 



Love and Comradeship 175 

themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and 
dust, they are a part of the furnishing of the 
earth. If I am cold and seek furs Alaska is as 
near as the next snowdrift. My brother has 
caused it to be so. Everywhere is five cents 
away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon from 
Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With 
the handle of my knife from India and the blade 
from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas. Thou- 
sands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste 
in my mouth, five or six continents have made 
for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip of 
my tongue. 

And this is the thing my brother means, the 
thing he has done for me, solitary. I keep 
saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to 
tctke it in — to feel the touch of the hands of 
his hands. Does any one say this thing he is 
doing is done for money — that it is not done 
for comradeship or love? Could money have 
thought of it or dared it or desired it? Could 
all the money in the world ever pay him for it? 
This paper-ticket I give him — for this berth I 
lie in — does it pay him for it? Do I think to pay 
my fare to the infinite? — I — a parasite of a 
great roar in a city ? These seven nights in the 
hollow of his hand he has held me and let me 
look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven — of 
clouds. I have visited with the middle of the 
sea. 



176 Ideas Behind the Machines 

And now with a thought, have I furnished 
my hot plain and smoke forever. 

I have not time to dream. I spell out each 
night, before I sleep, some vast new far-off love, 
this new daily sense of mutual service, this whole 
round world to measure one's being against. 
Crowds wait on me in silence. I tip nations 
with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie 
in my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart. 

When I go out on the meadow at high noon 
and in the great sleepy sunny silence there I 
stand and watch that long imperious train go 
by putting together the White Mountains and 
New York, it is no longer as it was at first, a 
mere train by itself to me, — a flash of parlor cars 
between a great city and a sky up on Mt. 
Washington. When it swings up between my 
two little mountains its huge banner of steam 
and smoke, it is the beckoning of The Other 
Trains, the whole starful, creeping through the 
Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, 
roaring through the sun or pounding through 
the dark on the under sides of the world. 

In the great silence on the meadow after the 
train rolls b3% it would be hard to be lonely 
for a minute, not to stand still, not to share 
in spirit around the earth a few of the big, 
happy things — the far unseen peoples in the 
sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the 
statesmen, and poets, but always between 



Love and Comradeship 177 

and above and beneath the streets and the 
domes and the towers, and the statesmen and 
poets — always the engineers, — I keep seeing them 
— these men who dip up the world in their 
hands, who sweep up life. . . long, narrow, little 
towns of souls, and bowl them through the 
Days and Nights. 

In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern 
world — one would rather be running the poems 
than writing them. At night I turn in my 
sleep. I hear the midnight mail go by — that same 
still face before it, the great human headlight of 
it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the 
thunder of the Face has died awa)^ I am still 
wondering. Out there on the roof of the world, 
thundering alone, thundering past death, past 
glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding 
away villages behind him (the strange, soft, 
still little villages), pounding on the switch- 
lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips 
of earth and sky. . . . The cities swoon 
before him . . . swoon past him. Thundering 
past his own thunder, echoes dying away . . . 
and now out in the great plain, out in the 
fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, 
little black miles. . . . Every now and 
then he thinks back over his shoulder, thinks 
back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. 
He laughs bitterly at sleep, at the men with 
tickets, at the way the men with tickets believe 



178 Ideas Behind the Machines 

in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the 
lever) he is not infaUible. Once . . . twice . . . 
he might have ... he almost . . . Then sud- 
denly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his 
teeth, he reaches out with his soul . . . masters 
it, he strains himself up to his infallibility again 
... all those people there . . . fathers, mothers, 
children, . . . sleeping on their arms full of 
dreams. He feels as the minister feels, I 
should think, when the bells have stopped on 
a Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit 
alone, alone before God . . . alone before the 
Great Silence, and the people bow their 
heads. 

But I have found that it is not merely the 
machines that one can see at a glance are 
woven all through with men (like the great 
trains)which make the big companions. It is 
a mere matter of getting acquainted with the 
machines and there is not one that is not woven 
through with men, with dim faces of vanished 
lives — with inventors. 

I have seen great wheels, in steam and in 
smoke, like swinging spirits of the dead. I have 
been told that the inventors were no longer with 
us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies 
were tucked in cemeteries, in the crypts of 
churches, but I have seen them with mighty 
new ones in the night — in the broad day, in a 
nameless silence, walk the earth. Inventors may 



Love and Comradeship 179 

not be put like engineers, in show windows in 
front of their machines, but they are all wrought 
into them. From the first bit of cold steel on 
the cowcatcher to the little last whiff of breath 
in the air-brake, they are wrought in — fibre of 
soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind 
are wrought in the trees and rivers in the moun- 
tains, they are there. There is not a machine 
anywhere, that has not its crowd of men 
in it, that is not full of laughter and hope 
and tears. The machines give one some idea, 
after a few years of listening, of what the in- 
ventors' lives were like. One hears them — 
the machines and the men, telling about each 
other. 

There are days when it has been given to me 
to see the machines as inventors and prophets 
see them. 

On these days I have seen inventors handling 
bits of wood and metal. I have seen them 
taking up empires in their hands and putting 
the future through their fingers. 

On these days I have heard the machines 
as the voices of great peoples singing in the 
streets. 



And after all, the finest and most perfect use 
of machinery, I have come to think, is this one 
the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily joy in 



i8o Ideas Behind the Machines 

its presence. To have this communion with it 
speaking around one, on sea and land, and in 
the low boom of cities, to have all this vast 
reaching out, earnest machinery of human life — 
sights and sounds and symbols of it, beckon- 
ing to one's spirit day and night everywhere, 
playing upon one the love and glory of the world 
— to have — ah, well, when in the last great 
moment of life I lay my universe out in order 
around about me, and lie down to die, I shall 
remember I have lived. 

This great sorrowing civilization of ours, 
which I had seen before, always sorrowing at 
heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive 
energy in it, has come to me and lived 
with me, and let me see the look of the future 
in its face. 

And now I dare look up. For a moment — 
for a moment that shall live forever — I have 
seen once, I think — at least once, this great 
radiant gesturing of Man around the edges of a 
world. I shall not die, now, solitary. And 
when my time shall come and I lie down to 
do it, oh, unknown faces that shall wait with 
me, — let it not be with drawn curtains nor 
with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and 
silence and darkness. Do not shut out the 
great heartless-sounding, forgetting-looking roar 
of life. Rather let the windows be opened. 
And then with the voice of mills and of the 



Love and Comradeship i8i 

mighty street — all the din and wonder of it, 
— with the sound in my ears of my big brother 
outside living his great life around his little 
earth, I will fall asleep. 



BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK 



BIRD»S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK 



PART ONE 

I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in 
with its ancient rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, 
or with bouquets and doilies and songs of birds. It is 
a man's word, says The Twentieth Century. " If 
a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that con- 
quers a hill." 

II. The modem literary man — slow to be con- 
verted, is already driven to his task. Living in an 
age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are getting their 
living out of machines, or putting their Hving into 
them, he is not content with a definition of beauty 
which shuts down under the floor of the world nine 
tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves him standing by 
himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where— except 
by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway 
he has no way of communing with his kind. 

III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret 
them for the soul or the manhood of the men about 
him he sees that after a little while— in the great 
desert of machines, there will not be any men. 
A little while after that there will not be any ma- 
chines. He has come to feel that the whole problem 
of civilization turns on it— on what seems at first 

185 



1 86 Bird's-Eye View 

sight an abstract or literary theory — that there is 
poetry in machines. If we cannot find a great hope 
or a great meaning for the machine-idea in its sim- 
plest form, the machines of steel and flame that mmis- 
ter to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a 
machine simply because it is a machine, there is not 
going to be anything left in modem hfe with which to 
connect inspiring ideas. All our great spiritual values 
are being operated as machines. To take the stand 
that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be 
connected with machinery is to take a stand for the 
continued existence of modern religion (in all reverence) 
the God-machine, for modern education, the man- 
machine, for modern government, the crowd-machine, 
for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd, 
and for modem society — the machine in which the 
crowd Uves. 

IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of 
fact. The literary men who know the men who 
know the machines, the men who live with them, the 
inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts 
about the poetry in machinery. The real problem 
that stands in the way of interpreting and bringing 
out the poetry in machinery, instead of being a literary 
or aesthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting 
people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a 
poet. 

VI. The inventor is working out the passions and 
the freedoms of the people, the tools of the nations. 

The people are already coming to look upon the in- 
ventor under our modern conditions as the new form of 
prophet. If what we call literature cannot interpret 
the tools that men are daily doing their living with, 
literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as 
men are more creative and godlike in engines than 



Bird's-Eye View 187 

they are in poems the world listens to engines. If 
what we call the church cannot interpret machines, 
the church as a form of religion loses its leadership 
until it does. A church that can only see what a 
few of the men born in an age, are for, can only 
help a few. A religion that lives in a machine-age 
and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, 
is not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our 
machines. One of the machines that we have made 
could make a better religion than this. 

PART TWO 

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES 

I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called 
poetic it must have great ideas in it and must suc- 
cessfully express them; that the language of the ma- 
chines, considered as an expression of the ideas that are 
in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all 
language looked at in the outside way that men have 
looked at machines, is irrelevant and absurd. We 
listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of an archangel 
with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people 
who have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate 
than kissing as a form of human expression, between 
two immortal infinite human beings. 

II. The chief characteristic of the modem ma- 
chine as well as of everything else that is strictly 
modern is that it refuses to show o£E. The man who 
is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not 
feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas 
that belong with it, is not seeing it. The poetry is 
under water. 

III. I have heard it said that the modern man 



i88 Bird's-Eye View 

does not care for poetry. It would be truer to say 
that he does not care for old-fashioned poetry — the 
poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch wind- 
mill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly 
modem man. The idle foolish look of a magnet 
appeals to him more. Its language is more expressive 
and penetrating. He has learned that in proportion 
as a machine or anything else is expressive — in the 
modem language, it hides. The more perfect or 
poetic he makes his machines the more spiritual they 
become. His utmost machines are electric. Elec- 
tricity is the modem man's prophet. It sums up his 
world. It has the modem man's temperament — the 
passion of being invisible and irresistible. 

IV. Poetry and religion consist — at bottom, in 
being proud of God. Most men to-day are wor- 
shipping God — at least in secret, not merely because 
of this great Machine that He has made, running softly 
above us — moonlight and starlight. . . . but because 
He has made a Machine that can make machines, a 
machine that shall take more of the dust of the earth 
and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel 
and iron and say "Go ye now, — depths of the earth, 
heights of heaven — serve ye me ! Stones and mists, 
winds and waters and thunder — the spirit that is in 
thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God ! '' 

V. Everything has its language and the power of 
feeling what a thing means, by the way it looks, is a 
matter of noticing, of learning the language. The 
language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely 
know whether the machines are expressing their ideas 
or not. I only know that when I stand before a 
foundry hammering out the floors of the world, clash- 
ing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my soul 
to it, and in some way — I know not how, while it sings 
to me, I grow strong and glad. 



Bird's-Eye View 189 

PART THREE 

THE MACHINES AS POETS 

I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it ex- 
presses the soul of man — of a whole world of men. 

It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual 
soul of the individual man who creates the Machine — 
the inventor, and the man who Hves with the ma- 
chine — the engineer. 

It has poetry in it because it expresses God . He is the 
kind of God who can make men who can make machines. 

III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in 
expressing the man's soul it expresses the greatest idea 
that the soul of man can have — the man's sense of being 
related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not merely be- 
cause it makes the man think he is infinite but because 
it is making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When 
I hear the machines, I hear Man saying, "God and I." 

V. Machinery has poetry in it because in express- 
ing the infinity of man it expresses the two great im- 
measurable ideas of poetry and of the imagination 
and of the soul in all ages — the two forms of infinity — 
the liberty and the unity of man. 

The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea. 

A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its 
form reveals the nature of its substance, that is, con- 
veys its idea. 

Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable 
ideas consummately expressed. 

PART FOUR 

THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES 

The ideas of machinery in their several phases are 
sketched in chapters as follows : 

I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the 
body of the man. 



190 Bird's-Eye View 

III. The idea of liberty — the soul's rescue from 
environment. 

IV. The idea of immortality. 
V. The idea of God. 

VI. The idea of the Spirit — of the Unseen and 
Intangible. 

VII. The practical idea of invoking great men. 
VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship. 



Note. — The present volume is the first of a series 
which had their beginnings in some articles in the 
Atlantic a, few years ago, answering or trying to answer 
the question, "Can a machine age have a soul?'' 
Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as 
it stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that 
the various phases and implications of machinery — 
the general bearing of machinery in our modern life, 
upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the 
arts, are being considered in a series of three volumes 
called : 
I. The Voice of the Machines. 
II. Machines and Millionaires. 
III. Machines and Crowds. 



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MOUNT TOM. An all outdoors magazine, devoted to rest 
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The Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Mass. 



DEC 21 1906 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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